Biophysical Society Bulletin | May 2022

InMemoriam

Denis A. Baylor Denis A. Baylor (1940–2022), Professor Emeritus of Neurobiol- ogy at Stanford Medical School, died on the Stanford golf course on March 16, 2022, at the age of 82. The cause of death appeared to be a cardiac arrhythmia. He gained international recognition for unraveling early steps in the visual process, in particular the

ical School, Michaelangelo Fuortes at the National Institutes of Health, and Nobel laureate Alan Hodgkin at the Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge, England. From 1965 to 1978, he was married to Cheryl Clayton , the mother of his sons. In 1983, he married Eileen van Tassel . From 1972 to 1974, he was on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School. In 1974 he moved to Stanford, where he was a charter member of the Medical School’s Neurobiology Department. At Stanford he did research, mentored postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, and taught medical students and undergraduates. He particularly enjoyed doing science with his trainees and took pride in their accomplishments. After retiring from Stan- ford, he spent two years as a Senior Scientific Officer for the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation. Baylor is survived by his wife, Eileen Baylor ; his brothers, Michael and Stephen, retired professors at Lehigh University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively; two sons, Denis, a software engineer, and Michael, an emergency room physician; and a daughter, Michele Engelke , a homemaker. He has nine grandchildren. His wife, sons and daughter, parents, brothers, and grandchildren were sources of great joy. He was an avid golfer and a devoted fan of the Stanford football team. His work was honored by numerous awards, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and the Royal Soci- ety of London. With his brothers, he published several books containing writings of his parents: Charlemagne, the Story of a French Cat; Nighttime Remembrances and Other Poems ; and Essays, Poems, and Stories . A celebration of his life is to be scheduled. If desired, memorial contributions may be made to Ravenswood Family Health Network of East Palo Alto, California, or another worthy charity. — Stephen Baylor

Denis A. Baylor

mechanism by which light from the outside world triggers the neural signals that initiate vision. He described the laws that govern how the rod and cone photoreceptor cells in the retina of our eyes encode light and color, preparing a neural repre- sentation of the visual scene for further analysis by higher-or- der cells in the eye and brain. He and his colleagues invented a new method for recording the responses of individual rod and cone cells to light. This allowed them to identify and characterize for the first time the response of a retinal rod cell to absorption of a single quantum of light energy. Using a variety of techniques, they helped to elucidate the molecular events that couple light absorption in visual pigment mole- cules to generation of the rod’s electrical response to light. He and colleagues also described the function of retinal circuits that begin the analysis of visual scenes. Baylor grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, the son of Hugh Murray Baylor and Elisabeth Anne Baylor , Professors of Music and French, respectively, at Knox College. In 1961, he graduated from Knox College and, in 1965, from Yale Medical School, where he received the M.D. degree. While in college and medical school he became interested in the function of the nervous system, and after medical school chose a career in research and teaching rather than clinical practice. He trained in neurobiology with three mentors: John Nicholls at Yale Med-

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May 2022

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