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Photo by Reed Hutchinson UCLA
Photographic Services
H. Ronald Kaback, professor of physiology, microbiology
and molecular genetics, will deliver the prestigious Faculty
Research Lecture on Oct. 14. |
97th Faculty Research Lecturer
Scientist studies 'third amino acid from left'
BY ANNE BURKE
UCLA Today Staff
With less than two weeks remaining before he would deliver UCLA’s
97th Faculty Research Lecture, H. Ronald Kaback was a little worried.
His research field is the molecular biology of membrane transport.
To explain to someone what that means requires “two hours
and a chalkboard,” he said. At cocktail parties, he tells
people he works on “the third amino acid from the left”
and leaves it at that.
But Kaback will have something working in his favor. “I love
to talk,” he said. In an interview in his office in the MacDonald
Medical Research Labs, he talked for more than 90 minutes, nearly
without letup and with little academic pretentiousness.
He prefaces remarks with phrases like, “I’ll tell you
how crazy I really am.” He insists that he is not unusually
smart, but driven. He has a tendency to call the material that has
consumed his attention for decades “that stupid protein.”
Though he can no longer swing a racket because of sports injuries,
Kaback wears tennis shorts to work most days over the objections
of Teenchy, his wife of 47 years, whom he met in high school. “In
my head, I’m still a jock,” said Kaback, who played
high school and college football.
Kaback, a professor of physiology, and his UCLA research team collaborated
with So Iwata and Jeff Abramson of Imperial College London to determine
the three-dimensional structure of a protein known as lactose permease
(LacY). The protein is important as a model for a huge family of
membrane transport proteins.
Published in August 2003 in the journal Science, the breakthrough
catapulted Kaback into the limelight and led to a series of international
speaking engagements that were so physically taxing he ended up
in surgery after aggravating a shoulder injury. “I should
have turned down half of them,” he said. “How come I
didn’t? Are you insane? There’s a lot of ego in this.”
Kaback was born in Philadelphia, the eldest of three siblings.
His pharmacist father expected the two boys to become physicians,
so Kaback enrolled in premed at Haverford College. By fortuitous
coincidence, Haverford at that time was the only college anywhere
at which undergraduates could study what would become molecular
biology. Kaback started doing experiments and “got incredibly
turned on.”
“Good science is like art. It’s like composing music
or painting. It’s just that the tools are different,”
he explained.
Kaback went on to study medicine at New York’s Albert Einstein
College, where he got the idea to use bacterial membrane vesicles
to study membrane transport. His first experiment a success, Kaback
threw himself into the field with manic zeal.
“I remember one night I was trying to reproduce an experiment,
but I couldn’t. I said, ‘I’m staying here until
it works.’ I watched the dawn rise, at which point I threw
the test tubes against the wall and went home.”
These days, Kaback spends most of his time writing, coming up with
ideas and “cheerleading” his researchers. His lecture,
“The Passion of the Permease: From Membrane to Molecule to
a Mechanism of Active Transport,” is slated for Oct. 14 at
3 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall.
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