Remembering Eva Neer

up G proteins for a living. In that time spanned by the blink of an eye, I see Eva The most precious possession of a biochemist is puriNeer, all 592′′ of her, playing basketball with Ernie Peralta fied protein, and like gold in the bank, they spend it and his graduate students. I see her volunteering to cautiously. Luckily (and wisely), Eva was hesitant to give wriggle through a small window to let fellow late night us her most purified Ga subunit. Instead, she gave us revelers into the bar after hours at a signal transduction a crude mixture that contained both G protein Ga and Gordon Conference. I see her quietly, but courageously, Gbg subunits. When applied to the intracellular surface standing up to scientific and societal bullies. Eva Neer, of a patch-clamped heart cell, it activated the channels Harvard Professor of Biochemistry, died February 20, like rocket fuel. Now, with Eva’s full attention, we worked 2000 from breast cancer at the age of 62. together and quickly came to understand it was the Gbg In 1939, at 1 year of age, Eva Julia Augenblick escaped subunit that was the active component. We published the Nazi invasion of Warsaw under her mother’s skirts. this fact in Nature in 1987, and were quite happy and The only child of a lawyer father and a Rabelian scholar proud of ourselves, thinking of all the experiments we mother, her family spent 5 years in Brazil before emigratcould do next. ing to New York. Educated first at Radcliffe, she finished But scientists are conservative, not unlike priests in her degree at Barnard while her husband, Robert Neer, the fifteenth century, and these findings were heretical. was beginning his studies in medicine at Columbia. Eva We further aggravated our critics by taking a bit of impish also studied medicine at Columbia, and carried out postdelight in the process, and angering a pair of prominent graduate work at Georgetown University Hospital and and aggressive scientists. Their laboratories reported in Yale University before returning to Harvard to begin her over a score of papers that it was the Ga subunit alone careers as mother and scientist. She brought a magic (at subpicomolar concentrations) that activated the to both that made the kind of success that is most channel. In meeting after meeting, they insisted that our valuable, a full life that was appreciated by its owner work was wrong. We suffered under the Ga inquisitors even as it was being spun out. And in turn, she enriched and about this time Eva put up a poster of Joan of Arc all those who came close to her. in her office. One could spend a lot of time describing At Harvard, Eva was a postdoctoral fellow in the labothese scientific battles, and how we felt, but a quick ratory of Dr. Guido Guidotti. She was an excellent and summary is to imagine us crouching behind Joan of independent biochemist, working to characterize adeArc’s shield before fire-breathing dragons. But we kept nylyl cyclase, the enzyme that generates the universal working, and other laboratories eventually entered the second messenger cAMP. During this time she had two field. By 1994, it was finally accepted that Gbg, not Ga, boys, Richard and Bobby, often bringing them to the