In Memoriam: Fredric S. Fay

Fred Fay died unexpectedly at 53 years of age while working with colleagues in Germany. Fred spent most of his career at the University of Massachusetts Medical School where he had been one of the founding faculty members. His biological interests were the contractile mechanisms of smooth muscle and chemotaxis, but Fred’s greatest enthusiasm was for instrumentation. Fred invented new ways to see into cells. He extended the limits of light microscopy and employed clever tools to amplify and detect the cell’s inner workings. Fred Fay’s first exposure to research, at age 20, was at Cornell, measuring oxygenconsumption in brine shrimp. He completed honors research in chemistry at Cornell by determining intermediates in the biosynthesis of bacteriochlorophyll. Working for his doctoral research with J. R. Pappenheimer at Harvard Medical School, Fred studied oxygen consumption of the carotid body, and in his first motility study, measured the contractile response of the ductus arteriosus. The University of Massachusetts Department of Physiology captured Fred 1 year after his Ph.D. by making him an assistant professor. Fred then departed from his previous work by focusing on smooth muscle, using the toad stomach as a convenient source of muscle cells. He designed and implemented an ultrasensitive and stable force transducer, which measured forces ranging from a few to several hundred micrograms. Inspired by methods used by Andrew Huxley, Fred attached single cells to the transducer to derive length-tension/stiffness relations. With Stuart Taylor, Fred used the jellyfish calcium-sensing luminescent molecule, aequorin, to measure the calcium change initiating contraction in single smooth muscle cells. More recently, he led an innovative team of engineers, mathematicians, and biologists that developed high speed digital imaging microscopes. He showed that wide field fluorescence microscopy with image restoration could suppress confocal microscopy indetection efficiency and avoid theproblems of bleaching and ultraviolet damage. Fred held eight patents on various innovations in microscopy. With these powerful imaging methods, he could directly visualize calcium in single endoplasmic reticular stores and follow precursor mRNA metabolism in the nucleus. In all, he mentored more than 30 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows as well as 3 children. Fred will be sorely missed by fellow scientists, family, and friends.