Lily Jan

Lily Jan is Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She began her long-term collaboration with her husband Yuh Nung Jan when they both took the neurobiology summer courses at Cold Spring Harbor (CSH) right after they finished graduate school at Caltech in 1974; they started recordings from the Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction during the last few days of the CSH lab course and went on to identify Shaker as a behavioral mutant with defective potassium channel function while they were postdocs in Seymour Benzer’s lab at Caltech. Their subsequent collaboration as postdocs in Steve Kuffler’s lab at Harvard led to the identification of a peptide transmitter that generates the late slow excitatory postsynaptic potential (EPSP) in neurons that have no synaptic contact with the peptidereleasing nerve terminals, thereby providing evidence for ‘action at a distance’ of peptide transmitters that can diffuse and excite neurons tens of microns away. Because Yuh Nung and Lily Jan both believed in the importance of molecular identification of the ion channel of interest so that each channel type can be studied one at a time, ion channel studies in their lab at UCSF began with molecular identification of the founding members of three channel families, starting with Shake cloning for voltage-gated potassium channels in 1987 and followed with expression cloning of the IRK1 inwardly rectifying potassium channel in 1993 and the TMEM16A calcium-activated chloride channel (CaCC) in 2008. These ion channel studies encompass biophysical queries about how a channel works, cell biological questions about how the channel number as well as channel properties may be regulated to modulate channel activity, and physiological analyses of channel function in neurons and other cell types. How did you become a biologist? After graduating from the National Taiwan University with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1968, I went to Caltech to study theoretical high-energy physics with George Zweig as my thesis advisor. After a couple years in the physics graduate program Yuh Nung and I both switched to biology under the influence of Max Delbrück. The trials and tribulations of my early years as a total novice trying to figure out whether I could do experiments in biology — too long a story to be told here that involves among other things thousands of chicken heads and an intimidating rabbit — are included in an autobiographical chapter Yuh Nung Jan and I wrote for the eighth volume of the History of Neuroscience in Autobiography, edited by Larry Squire. This volume will be published this year, and will join the archival chapters available online (http:// www.sfn.org/about/history-ofneuroscience/autobiographicalchapters) in due course. I have fond memories of catching up with George Zweig during our induction to the National Academy of Sciences in 1997. To biologists, George is known for his second major scientific contributions — in neurobiology — after his first major contribution proposing that mesons and other strongly interacting particles are composed of subatomic particles that George named aces r while he was working at CERN in Geneva in 1964 (these subatomic particles were independently proposed by Murray Gell-Mann, also in 1964, and dubbed with the name quarks, their more commonly known name). In 1971 George turned his attention from physics to sound transduction in the cochlea. His profound understanding of the way the human inner ear responds to sound led to his design of a music synthesizer for part of the sound track for the Star Trek movie, and other novel devices for speech analyses. So here we have the happy circumstance that my physics professor and I the pupil both became biologists in the seventies.