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MBL Liasons
 Gary Borisy
Gary Borisy is Director and Chief Executive Officer of the MBL. He comes to the MBL from Northwestern University where he is Associate Vice President for Research and the Leslie B. Arey Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology in the Feinberg School of Medicine. He received his B.S. in biochemistry and his Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Chicago. After serving a postdoctoral fellowship in H. E. Huxley’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the MRC in Cambridge, England, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He spent 32 years at Madison, rising through the professional ranks to Chairman of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Perlman-Bascom Professor of Life Sciences, before moving to Northwestern in 2000.
Dr. Borisy has received numerous professional honors throughout his career. He received an NIH MERIT Award. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology (2003); and received the Carl Zeiss Award in 2005 from the German Society for Cell Biology. He currently serves as a Section Head for Faculty of 1000, Cell Biology; he is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for CombinatoRx and is an incoming member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (2006).
 Shinya Inoué
Since first coming to the MBL as a student in 1949, Shinya Inoué has been interested in exploring the fine structural and molecular mechanisms underlying motile events in living cells. He also enjoys inventing or improving upon light microscopes, so that one could see better images, and analyze events taking place at dimensions far below the microscope's limit of resolution. Using his improved polarizing microscope, Shinya first proved the reality of spindle fibers and filaments that had been suspected of being fixation artifacts for 50 years. Then using further modified polarizing microscope systems, he and his students demonstrated that microtubules were not static threads but were highly dynamic molecular assemblies that were assembled or disassembled by subtle changes in physico-chemical or cellular parameters; thus chromosomes and other organelles could in part be transported by the dynamic assembly-disassembly of appropriately positioned microtubules. He is a pioneer in video microscopy which has opened up many new opportunities in cellular and molecular biology (see his book Video Microscopy, published in 1986 and 1995 by Plenum Press). Also very recently, he developed the centrifuge polarizing microscope, by which one can directly observe the stratification and alignment of organelles, and their changes (for example upon activation of oocytes), in living cells exposed to up to 10,000 times Earth's gravitational field (J. Microscopy 201: 341, 357). Shinya, who was awarded the 2003 International Prize for Biology, heads the Architectural Dynamics in Living Cells, MBL year round program.
 Ed Taylor
In his PhD training at the University of Chicago, Taylor studied the mechanism of mitosis. The outstanding questions were how was the mitotic spindled assembled, what was it made of and how are chromosomes moved. After post-doctoral studies of neurofilaments in the lab of F O Schmitt, he returned to Chicago to set up a lab to investigate these problems. The work of his students Gary Borisy, Richard Weissenberg and Michael Shelanski led to the isolation and characterization of tubulin, which is assembled into the microtubulules that form the mitotic spindle. Chromosome motion was still a blank and attention turned to two other problems. It should be easier first understand the mechanism of movement in muscle contraction, which uses known proteins, actin and myosin, and to look for these proteins in non-muscle cells. Mark Adelman was able to isolate a pure actin and a myosin-like protein from slime mold and similar work was also in progress by Hatano and Oosawa. It was now clear that actomyosins must be involved in intra and extra cellular movement. A series of studies of the kinetic mechanism of actomyosin that started from the work of Birdwell Finlayson and Richard Lymn led to a model that correlated the biochemical mechanism with movement in muscle contraction. Thirty years later this relatively crude model has evolved into a real molecular mechanism in which the conformation changes of the proteins produce the movement step. The missing molecule that might be involved in mitosis, now called a molecular motor, was found in neurons. The next problem was to work out the mechanism of motion of the kinesin motor along microtubules. After struggling with the isolation of kinesin from brain, a collaboration began with Ron Vale to use various constructs expressed in bacteria. Based on this work and contributions from several labs a kinetic mechanism of processive kinesin was worked out. The question of what moves chromosomes is still not completely understood but several kinesins seem to be involved. Taylor recently moved to Northwestern to get back to cell biology and to collaborate with Gary Borisy. Currently the main interest is in modeling the behavior of actin networks in cell movements.
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