Fred Sachs

University at Buffalo, NY, USA

I majored  in Physics as an undergraduate, a background I recommend to all interested parties. I worked for a couple years in the aerospace industry doing noise analysis…….oops I made a mistake…….I almost never worked, but I did show up. I was seduced into Biophysics through grants from the Institute of Serendipity and did a thesis on the cable properties of microarrays of heart cells.  I left the cloudy days of Upstate Medical in Syracuse and went to a postdoc in Hawaii where I did EPR and fluorescence. I then postdoced in NIH working on water structure in cells and created with Ramon Latorre  the least quoted paper on the topic. I did noise analysis on cells (never know where previous experience will help) and did a tortured development of the patch clamp that was rightfully won by Bert and Ernie. Moving to Buffalo, I taught cardiac pharmacology, developed single cell cardiac voltage clamp and began doing single channels and through anther grant from the Institute of Serendipity and collaboration with Falguni Guharay discovered mechanosensitive ion channels, God forbid, in the prime motor organ, muscle. To try and discover an inhibitor or activator of the channels, we violated the NIH guideline of not doing blind searches and found a specific (non toxic) peptide in tarantula venom. This peptide is in development as a therapy for muscular dystrophy.  Studying cell mechanics we discovered that osmotic stress in eukaryotic cells is not confined to the membrane but is distributed throughout the cytoskeleton as in a sponge.  Blessed with wonderful collaborators, I indulged in measuring the stress in patches, specific proteins in cells and have learned that red cells have MSCs essential to normal circulation. WE made lots of software and gadgets following Gallileo’s advice, “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”