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The Jean & Katsuma Dan Lectureship in Embryology/Physiology
6/29/09 - 9:00 AM, Lillie Auditorium
"Cell Intercalation and the Forces that Shape the Embryo"
Raymond Keller, University of Virginia
Ray Keller grew up on a dairy farm in southeast Missouri, received a B.S. in Biology from Southeast Missouri State University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois with David Stocum. He did postdoctoral work with J.P. Trinkaus at Yale University and with Robert Briggs at Indiana University. He joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1980 and moved to the University of Virginia in 1995 where he is the Alumni Council Thomas Jefferson Professor. He served as the Chair of the Department of Biology (1999-2004), Program Director of the NIH Developmental Biology Training Grant, and is Co-Director of the Morphogenesis and Regenerative Medicine Institute at Virginia.
His laboratory is known for analysis of the cellular, molecular and biomechanical basis of gastrulation and neurulation in amphibians, particularly the convergent extension movements that function prominently in shaping the vertebrate body plan. The laboratory contributed to the use of high-resolution imaging of cell motility in tissues and embryos, to the biomechanical analysis of embryonic morphogenetic forces and tissue material properties, to use of specialized explants to assay cell behavior, and to development of the concept of cell intercalation as a morphogenetic process. In addition to his research, he teaches an advanced undergraduate developmental biology laboratory, and he has taught in the Embryology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, and in the Xenopus course at Cold Spring Harbor.
Jean Clark and Katsuma Dan met when they were graduate students of the American physiologist, L.V. Heilbrunn. They studied with him at the University of Pennsylvania and spent their summers at the MBL. Katsuma Dan received his Ph.D. in 1934; Jean Clark received hers in 1936 after which they married and settled in Nagai, a five-mile bike ride to their laboratory in Misaki. They came from vastly different backgrounds: He was the son of a wealthy Japanese baron and she was from Presbyterian Yankee stock, but they shared a love for science, Woods Hole, and the MBL.
Katsuma Dan was one of Japan’s most influential and original biologists, a skillful administrator, and a scientific statesman. He was credited with original studies of marine organisms, their cell division, fertilization, early development, cell differentiation, and lunar-influenced spawning cycles. Katsuma Dan died in 1996 in Osaka, Japan, at the age of 91.
Jean Dan was the progenitor of an international effort to understand the interaction between the sperm and the egg; she discovered the acrosomal reaction that unites sperm to egg cell membrane. Her superb translations of Japanese biological works into English have been instrumental in the export of Japanese discovery to the West. Jean died in 1978, and her ashes were brought back from Japan and scattered on the water near Nobska Point.
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