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Neurobiology department was an extraordinary place
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Neurobiology department was an extraordinary place
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Views | Duration | |
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61. Simons Simplex Collection | 04:11 | ||
62. Collecting data on autism | 02:23 | ||
63. Research into autism genetics | 05:17 | ||
64. Remarkable people in my lab | 00:48 | ||
65. Rich O'Brien and Rich Hume | 02:53 | ||
66. Lorna Role | 01:00 | ||
67. Other talented people in my lab | 03:26 | ||
68. Neurobiology department was an extraordinary place | 01:02 | ||
69. There is no place like Harvard | 03:23 | ||
70. Ben Barres | 00:56 |
Two other people, David Farb and Dennis Choi. Dennis was a student of mine at Harvard, David preceded Dennis [in my lab]. And they worked on GABA and glycine and glutamate amino acid transmitters, so that was a whole new area for me, branching out from acetylcholine, which was terrific.
Doug Falls, Ken Rosen, and David Harris in my lab worked on the purification [of ARIA] and did the work of 20 people. We were not at that time experienced or talented in molecular biology, but they brought the lab into the forefront of molecular science.
Two other people I'd really like to mention are Larry Trussell, who's a physiologist, who's now in Oregon at the Neuroscience Institute there. Who worked on amino acid receptors in neurons, very talented guy. And Eric Frank, who was unique. He was a postdoc at Harvard in the Neurobiology Department. I knew his father, Karl Frank, who was head of the lab at the NIH when I went there. Eric was a little boy then, but Eric was very smart, very talented from Reed College and Harvard Graduate School. I think I described his experiments. He was so talented. He would set up optics electrophysiology and pharmacology from perfusion pipettes over a given identified synapse using high-resolution microscopy.
He would position the recording electrode, the iontophoretic electrode and a third stimulating electrode. And when he was really right at the micron spot which he wanted to assay, he would step on a pedal and all of the switches would flip. He'd set everything up. I told him I could swear I heard the toilets in the hallway flush. He harnessed the technology better than anyone I had worked with. He stayed for about three years and then moved on. He left science fairly early. I'm not sure what he's doing now. He loved to sail with his father.
Gerald Fischbach (b. 1938) is an American neuroscientist and pioneering researcher. He pioneered the use of nerve cell cultures to study the electrophysiology, morphology and biochemistry of developing nerve-muscle and inter-neuronal synapses.
Title: Other talented people in my lab
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: David Farb, Dennis Choi, Douglas Falls, Ken Rosen, David Harris, Larry Trussell, Karl Frank
Duration: 3 minutes, 26 seconds
Date story recorded: July 2023
Date story went live: 16 May 2025