Biophysical Society Bulletin | September 2021

Biophysicist in Profile

Daryl Eggers Areas of Research How water influences binding and conformational equilibria

Institution San José State University

At-a-Glance

Realizing his strengths lay in science and math, Daryl Eggers studied chemical engineering and planned on a career in industry. Two trips “back to school” later and he was surprised to find his calling as a researcher and professor. Nearing retirement, he reflects that his most valuable contri- bution to the field has been educating those starting out on their scientific careers.

Daryl Eggers

Like many biophysicists, Daryl Eggers , Professor of Chemistry at San José State University (SJSU), excelled in math and sci- ence courses in high school. “Everyone said I should become an engineer, so I enrolled as a chemical engineering major at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) in 1977 without a true understanding of what my job options would be after graduation,” he explains. RHIT was just an hour’s drive west of his home town of Plainfield, Indiana, “making it easy for me to visit family on weekends during my undergraduate educa- tion. I realize now how incredibly fortunate I was to be able to focus on my studies without working in a part-time job at the same time, a luxury that most of my current students do not enjoy.” Biology courses were not offered at RHIT at the time, but he took an elective course in biochemical engineering “where I was introduced to the four classes of biomolecules in the first chapter of a classic textbook by Bailey & Ollis,” he says. “That material excited me and remained in the back of my mind as I pursued my first job.” Following his graduation from RHIT in 1981, he accepted a job offer with M.W. Kellogg, an engineering and construction company in Houston, Texas. “Naively, I thought I would work for Kellogg the rest of my career, but I quickly learned that there was no job security in a company where the contracts and workload parallel the ups and downs of the oil indus- try. After losing many lunch date friends to layoffs, I started thinking seriously about returning to school and decided to apply to master’s degree programs that offer a concentration in biochemical engineering; my new goal was to land a job in the booming biotechnology industry,” Eggers shares. At that point he did not plan on pursuing a PhD, as he did not view himself as qualified or worthy of the degree and did not have a clear picture of what life in graduate school would be like. “I ended up at University of California, Berkeley and was accepted into the bioengineering group of Harvey Blanch where I was surrounded by some amazing people and where I gained my first research experience,” he says. “Although several labmates suggested that I stay on and get my PhD,

I followed my plans to leverage the MS degree into a job in biotechnology.” He joined the research wing of Syntex, a pharmaceutical com- pany based in Palo Alto, California and found it to be an ideal job for a bioengineer: working with a small team in charge of expressing, purifying, and increasing production of recombi- nant proteins from bench scale to pilot plant. “This experience improved my confidence as a scientist, but I realized that I could not advance far up the research ladder without a PhD. One of my projects during this period involved the refolding of a protein that I had purified from inclusion bodies. A frustrat- ingly low refolding yield led me to the library, but I found the literature on protein folding in the 1980s to be very unsatisfy- ing. ‘Maybe I could go back to school (again), pursue some of my own ideas on protein folding for a thesis, and then rejoin industry research as a project leader?’” he thought. “At the time, I wasn’t entangled with house payments or any financial obligations, so I decided to apply to some top PhD programs in California. I decided to target pharmacology programs, and I was delighted and honored to be admitted to the Pharma- cology Department of the School of Medicine at University of California San Francisco (UCSF).” He persevered through ups and downs at UCSF and com- pleted his PhD degree in 1997. “My thesis research was performed in the laboratory of William J. Welch , one of the first scientists to characterize the heat shock response and to identify specific proteins that act as molecular chaperones. Thus, my attention was turned more toward protein folding in the cell, versus the refolding of recombinant proteins in vitro,” he explains. “During this time, I had a fateful discussion in the office of Ken Dill , then at UCSF, where I expressed my concern that the scientific community was overstating the importance of chaperones and where I put forward the idea that the crowded environment of the cell had something to do with the high fidelity of protein folding in vivo; I had recently read some papers by Allen Minton that I thought might have relevance to protein folding, even though the early Minton papers did not mention proteins. Ken showed me the cover of a Science issue that featured some colorful proteins encapsu-

September 2021

2

T H E N E W S L E T T E R O F T H E B I O P H Y S I C A L S O C I E T Y