John Newport 1951–2005

The news is so full of lives cut short that one might worry that we have become inured to the experience. But cold reality asserts itself when a premature death strikes within our own community, and the full tragedy and the wasted opportunity are exposed. We then pause to mark the singularity of human existence and the personal nature of science itself. John Newport, distinguished professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, died on December 26th, 2005 after a few short months fighting pancreatic cancer. At 54, he was one of those rare people in science whose stamp was as original as his ideas were profound. John’s battle with cancer was so short that few people will remember him as anything but athletic, healthy, and vigorous. He was imaginative, modest, caring, and supremely devoted to his children, Kassie and Josh, and deeply appreciative of his life partner Douglass Forbes. John thought like a physical chemist but was willing to delve deeply into the dark unknown territory of biology. He trained with Peter von Hippel at the University of Oregon, working on the molecular mechanisms of the DNA replication complex of the T4 bacteriophage. In that work, he focused initially on the binding and interaction of the single-stranded DNA binding protein and then proceeded to lay out how the system as a whole assembles and functions. This work foreshadowed his subsequent studies on the assembly of the entire nucleus as an organelle and, according to von Hippel, served as an important template for the work of their lab for the next decade. When he came to Marc Kirschner’s laboratory at UCSF, John first tackled the problem of the profound changes in the cell cycle that occur in eggs of the frog Xenopus after the twelfth cleavage postfertilization. Through elegant experiments, he showed that the egg contains a timer regulated by the nucleocytoplasmic ratio that controls the cell cycle, cell motility, and transcription (Newport and Kirschner, 1982). John’s experiments combined micromanipulation of embryos with molecular analysis and timelapse movies. Nearly 25 years later, the mid-blastula transition still excites students of developmental biology as one of the deep, unresolved problems of cellular physiology. These experiments established John as an unusual thinker who could conceptualize seemingly intractable problems and then solve them with a stirring mix of classical experiments and modern molecular techniques. From the mid 1980s until 1990, the basic features of the eukaryotic cell cycle were being established. The