University of California Seal

IN MEMORIAM

Richard Anthony Steinhardt

Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, Emeritus

UC Berkeley

1939—2014

 

On July 10, 2014, the campus lost one of its most ardent and devoted supporters and activists, Richard Steinhardt, following a heart attack at his home on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington.

 

Rick was born September 23, 1939, in Washington, D.C. His first exposure to biological research was during a summer spent as a teenager with his parents at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. He had a summer job delivering distilled water to the labs. He arranged his hours so that he could attend the afternoon seminars. An iconoclast from the start, who later loved to regale his friends with nearly incredible stories of youthful pranks and escapades, he nevertheless followed in the footsteps of his father into an illustrious career in biological research.

 

Rick entered Columbia University intending to study sociology or economics, but changed to zoology as an upperclassman. For graduate training he switched to physiology, receiving his Ph.D. with Edward Hodgson in 1966 for an electrophysiological analysis of chemoreception in the blowfly and its control of proboscis movements. From there he went to Cambridge University and the Plymouth Marine Station in England, where he worked with Richard Keynes and Alan Hodgkin on ionic transport mechanisms regulating internal ion concentrations in the squid giant axon and frog muscle.

 

Rick was hired as an Assistant Professor of Zoology at Cal in 1967, with the expectation that he would continue as a neurobiologist. But he immediately switched to cell and developmental biology, where he pioneered the use of electrophysiology to analyze the electrical events following fertilization of the sea urchin egg. He quickly expanded his research into novel measurements and manipulations of the intracellular ionic environment, particularly hydrogen and calcium ions, to show that they play critical roles in triggering the biochemical events during the initial development of an organism from a fertilized egg. Along the way, he developed the first effective intracellular pH electrode, for which he obtained a patent, one of seven at Berkeley. Within ten years of arriving at Berkeley, he progressed from being a novice in an unexplored field to the undisputed world leader in an area universally recognized for its importance. By the time he advanced to full professor in 1979, he had traced the ionic events leading to DNA replication and protein synthesis activation that are triggered by fertilization. He next turned to the study of nuclear membrane breakdown during mitotic cell division and showed that the rapid rise in intracellular calcium ions after sperm penetration triggers the secretion of the fertilization membrane that prevents polyspermy.

 

In the mid-1980s, Rick broadened his exploration of the ionic regulation of cellular processes to include the heat shock response of Drosophila salivary glands, the rise of electrical coupling between embryonic cells, and the dedifferentiation of muscle cells after denervation. By the late 80s, Rick’s focus changed again to the cellular basis of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He discovered the presence of an unusually active sarcolemmal leak channel that admits calcium to levels sufficiently high to activate proteases that destroy essential muscle proteins and promote cell death. He later identified this toxic pathway as a specialized calcium channel opened by emptying the sarcoplasmic reticulum of calcium (the so-called store-operated or calcium-release-activated calcium channel).

 

In the 1990s and after the turn of the century, Rick opened yet another area of research, the mechanism of cellular membrane resealing in the repair of membrane injury. He showed that this process involves the same biochemical steps underlying vesicle fusion in neurotransmission, hormone secretion, and protein trafficking, and that it shares with synaptic transmission remarkable features of long-term plasticity involved in learning and memory, thus finally coming full circle back to his roots in neurobiology. Rick found these explorations the most satisfying of his scientific career.

 

In all of these scientific peregrinations, Rick applied or developed techniques that were completely novel in each field, progressing rapidly from pioneering outlier to central leader of the area. His iconoclastic approach to science served him well, and earned him numerous honors, including a Miller Research Professorship, election as an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College of Cambridge University, as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as a plenary lecturer to the British Society of Cell Biology.

 

Rick received his education in the relatively staid 50s and early 60s, at Columbia and Cambridge Universities. Upon arriving at Cal, he was confronted with an academically diverse student body, engaged at the forefront of an international student-led social revolution. His insistence on high standards of achievement and analytical thinking did not at first gain his students’ affection, particularly in large lecture courses. But as time passed, the student body evolved, and so did Rick’s pedagogical sophistication and innovation. In his last ten years, he became one of the most highly praised and sought-after undergraduate instructors, who nevertheless retained high standards of performance and achievement, while managing to inspire and instill similar scholarly values into those attending his classes. To the envy and admiration of his colleagues, he received several nominations for Distinguished Teacher Awards.

 

Shortly after arriving at Cal, Rick developed the first undergraduate neurobiology course taught on this campus. As his research interests shifted to cell biology, beginning in the 1980s Rick developed new courses and course modules in cell, developmental, and regulatory biology at all levels from freshman seminars to the core course in cell biology to focused upper division electives to specialized graduate lecture, laboratory, and seminar courses. For over a decade, Rick developed a new course on average every 3 years. His teaching efforts extended beyond the Berkeley classroom. In 1975 he organized the Donald Wilson Memorial Lecture Series that boosted Berkeley’s reputation in neurobiology, and the following year he returned to the MBL in Woods Hole to teach in the Reproductive Biology course and establish a summer research lab. He was a Japan Ministry of Education Visiting Professor in 1996. He retired in 2005.

Rick’s generosity and commitment to mentoring graduate students were exceptional. He offered them financial support in times of need, and invested in their entrepreneurial projects with widely variable success. Despite maintaining a small research laboratory of 1-4 graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, he trained two minority Ph.D. students, and an astounding number of his trainees (25 of a total of about 35) secured faculty or senior scientific positions at universities or in government. He was equally devoted as a son, husband, and father, bringing his parents from Maryland to care for them in their last years, and serving on the Board of the Crowden School that his daughter attended.

 

Rick arrived on campus sporting shoulder-length hair during the Vietnam War protests and the Free Speech Movement, looking like a true representative of the beat generation. But he defied stereotypes by sometimes dressing in suit and tie. In his younger years, Rick was dismissive of Cal’s academic administrative structure, finding it cumbersome and unresponsive (on which several outside analysts concurred) -- he became a leader of the counter-status quo Berkeley Faculty Union. But just as he gradually turned his sharp intellect to becoming a master teacher, he developed insights into solving the problems of a large and sometime inefficient academic infrastructure. His opinions were highly influential in the massive reorganization of the biological sciences at Cal in the late 1980s, which served as a model of bioscience restructuring throughout the country and eventually the world. He moved from background adviser to active member to positions of leadership of numerous academic senate committees and task forces, among them the Committee on Committees, the Committee on Research, the Academic Planning Board, the Graduate Council, and the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects.

 

Throughout his life, Rick was a true Renaissance man. He was an avid reader of fiction and non-fiction. He was a frequent patron of the cinema, amassed a large collection of film classics that he liked to watch in a screening room in his home, became an accomplished photographer, collected decorative art and crafts, and was a partner in the Berkeley Mills furniture company. He enjoyed flying a shared airplane, sailing in San Francisco Bay, and cruising around the San Juan Islands. He knew how to live life to the fullest.

 

He is survived by his wife and collaborator, Janet Alderton, his daughters Alicia Steinhardt and Katherine Coates, and four grandchildren.

 

Robert Zucker

Terry Machen

Geoffrey Owen