Biophysical Society Newsletter | December 2017

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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

2017

DECEMBER

Biophysicist in Profile DA-NENG WANG

BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY

Officers President Lukas Tamm President-Elect Angela Gronenborn Past-President Suzanne Scarlata Secretary Frances Separovic Treasurer Kalina Hristova Council

Da-Neng Wang , professor at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine’s Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, a 10-year period of turbulence under the country’s leader Mao Zedong . Wang was born in Benxi, a coal and iron mining city, but he moved to the countryside in 1969 when his parents, who were medical doctors, were sent there for re-education. “Although my parents’ careers came to a stop, I actually enjoyed the four years in the countryside. Between school days, I helped the farmers with their work in the fields. I played in the mountains and river with friends, gathered food for our chickens and ducks, carried water from the well for cooking, and cut trees and chopped wood for heat in the winter,” he shares. “These experiences taught me a lot about life and friendship.” High schools, colleges, and universities were closed during the Cultural Revolution, so Wang attended just four and a half years of middle and high school combined. “Physics was a favorite subject of mine, largely because the physics teacher made us realize the power of the subject to explain and predict how the natural world works, often in elegant ways,” he says. “In 1976, the Cultural Revolution ended, and the school was able to teach seriously again. In the final year before graduation, we probably learned more than in the first three and a half years combined.” Universities reopened in 1978. Wang passed the entrance exam and enrolled at the Northeastern University in Shenyang, where he majored in metal physics, a combination of physical metallurgy and solid state phys- ics. “Despite large differences in experience and age — the students were graduates from the last 10 or 12 years and most had previously worked in factories or in the countryside,” he explains, “we all shared the goal of making up the time we lost, and mostly studied six and a half days a week.” After college, he entered the graduate school of the Chinese Academy of Science to pursue a master’s degree in the lab of Kehsin Kuo , a Swedish- trained crystallographer who specialized in high-resolution electron microscopy (EM). “He was a father figure to many of us, and he inspired us to think creatively and do the best science we could,” Wang says. “My project was to study crystal defects in alloys by directly observing the crys- tal lattice and its atoms using high-resolution electron microscopy. Kehsin wondered, given the high resolution of EM, why can’t one see atoms in biological macromolecules? Therefore, after I finished my master’s thesis, he made arrangements for me to go to Sweden, to learn three-dimensional EM image reconstruction of proteins, which set me on the path to struc- tural biology.” Wang arrived in April 1985 as a PhD student in Sven Hovmöller ’s lab at the University of Stockholm. “Sven was very kind and generous. I read my first biology textbook while in his lab. Not only did he teach me so much about science, he also sent me around to the various continents to

Zev Bryant Jane Clarke Bertrand Garcia-Moreno Teresa Giraldez Ruben Gonzalez, Jr. Ruth Heidelberger Robert Nakamoto Arthur Palmer Gabriela Popescu Marina Ramirez-Alvarado Erin Sheets Joanna Swain

Da-Neng Wang

Biophysical Journal Jane Dyson Editor-in-Chief

Society Office Ro Kampman Executive Officer

Newsletter Executive Editor Rosalba Kampman Managing Editor Beth Staehle Contributing Writers and Department Editors Dorothy Chaconas Daniel McNulty Laura Phelan Raelle Reid

Caitlin Simpson Elizabeth Vuong Ellen Weiss Production Ray Wolfe Catie Curry

Wang chopping wood at age 11 or 12.

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