Deric Bownds

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY

I start this section with some chunks from my old website, then give a narrative history below.

	M. Deric Bownds Emeritus Professor of Molecular Biology and Zoology Director, Program in the Biology of Mind Past Chair, Department of Zoology University of Wisconsin, Madison Molecular Biology Laboratory: 741A R.M. Bock Laboratories 1525 Linden Drive, Madison WI 53706, Phone: (608) 315-2478 FAX: (608) 262-4570 Email: mdbownds@wisc.edu
	Program in the Biology of Mind: Studies on the evolution, structure, and function of the minds of humans and other animals. 1994-present.
	Sensory physiology and biochemistry: The excitation and adaptation of vertebrate photoreceptors. 1963-1996. This graphic social and scientific history of the Bownds Laboratory was prepared for a laboratory reunion on the occasion of my 70th birthday. I gave a talk on May 14, 2013 to the McPherson Eye Research Institute seminar at the University of Wisconsin, describing the contributions of my laboratory (from 1968 to 1998) to understanding how light changes into a nerve signal in our eyes. (The talk is posted here.) The research program, supported for 28 years by NIH grant EY 00463 and now replaced by the Biology of Mind program, identified enzymes, internal messengers, and feedback pathways underlying the excitation and adaptation of the rod outer segments of vertebrate photoreceptors. A summary of much of this work can be found in the article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. See also Recent Vision Research Publications or a more complete Curriculum Vitae. Below, I give a brief description of my contributions to understanding the excitation and adaption of photoreceptors, and also to the Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison.

Review of Deric Bownds' professional life, and contributions to understanding vision.

In early Feburary of 2006, during a redesign of my website, I wrote down the brief account below. This graphic social and scientific history of the Bownds Laboratory was prepared for a laboratory reunion in May 2012, on the occasion of my 70th birthday. I gave a talk on May 14, 2013 to the McPherson Eye Research Institute seminar at the University of Wisconsin, describing the contributions of my laboratory (from 1968 to 1998) to understanding how light changes into a nerve signal in our eyes. (The talk is posted here.)

In my high school years I worked in the laboratory of Dr. Austen Riggs at the University of Texas in Austin, studying lamprey and frog hemoglobin. Work on the sulfhydryl groups of tadpole and frog hemoglobin became my senior thesis in Biochemical Sciences at Harvard. When Riggs heard that I was going to Harvard, he said "Look up George Wald, I did my Ph.D. work with him." I walked into Wald's office in my freshman year in 1959,. He was in an expansive mood and put me in the freshman seminar program recently funded by Edwin Land (Polaroid Co.). I tried to extract Vitamin A acid from calf livers. I returned to work in Wald's lab in my senior year, with a idea obtained from a biochemistry course taught by Konrad Bloch. Why not try to reduce the schiff base linkage connecting retinal (vitamin A aldehyde) to opsin in the visual pigment rhodospin by reducing it with sodium borohydride? This would form a stable covalent bond resistant to hydrolysis, and permit digestion of reduced rhodopsin with proteolytic enzymes. Then the amino acids near the site of attachment of retinal in rhodopsin could be identified. I got the basic experiment to work in my senior year at Harvard, published a Nature paper on the sodium borohydride reduction reaction in 1965, and then a 1967 paper on composition of the peptide to which retinal is attached in rhodopsin. This work consituted my Ph.D. thesis and was presented in a plenary session at the Federation meetings in 1968. In late 1967 I took a postdoctoral position in the Neurobiology department at Harvard Medical, and worked on the neurotransmitters glutamate and GABA in the lobster nervous system. I learned the basics of neurobiology, and decided that my career work was going to an effort to integrate the biochemistry and physiology of visual transduction in photoreceptor cells.

In December 1968 I started an Assistant Professorship at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where I have spent my professional life (associate, full, and emeritus professor in 1972,1975, and 2001, respectively). I still teach and maintain an office (a view with a room at the top of Bock Laboratories). From 1973-75 I was the first chariman of the new Neuroscience Ph.D. program at Wisconsin, securing its approval by the board of regents of the university. Soon after coming to Wisconsin, I started the first neurobiology course, taught first together with Julius Adler, and then for many years with Tony Stretton, who I had managed to get the Zoology Department to hire in 1971. My first major independent discovery was that the visual pigment rhodopsin becomes phosphorylated upon illumination. Subsequent work over the years has shown this reaction to be central in the turning off, or inactivation, of rhodospin after it is excited by light. I next developed a preparation in which the physiological and biochemistry of excitation and adaptation could be studied at the same time: suspension of purified frog rod outer segments still attached to the inner segment bag of mitochondria required to support the ion fluxes that change during illumination to generate a nerve signal. Using this preparation my laboratory determined that cyclic GMP level fall rapidly milliseconds after illumination, on the time scale of the nerve signal, much faster than in other known systems. This implicated cyclic GMP in the excitation process, an alternative to calcium ions then commonly supposed to be the key messenger linking rhodopsin excitation to the closing of channels in the plasma membrane of the rod outer segment. I next proposed that light excitation of rod outer segment causes calcium levels to fall on illumination, rather than increase as would be expected if it were the excitatory transmitter. Work by others with calcium sensitive dyes found this to be true. The laboratory then published a number of papers on the proteins linking rhodopsin excitation to changes in membrane permeability (G-protein, arrestin, cyclic GMP phosphodiesterase), examining the various ways in which these reactions were controlled, and purifying their components. In the early 1990s I was becoming increasing interested in broad studies of the evolution, development, and function of human and animal minds/brains. I began to spend so much time on this that I decided to start a second career and withdraw from vision research. My formal 'retirement' from vision research was noted in at dinner in 1996 at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology. Over a period of several years I obtained positions for those in my laboratory, developed the new interdisciplinary Biology of Mind course, and passed my teaching in the Neurobiology course on to others. During the last years of my tenure I was chair of the Zoology Department, restructured its staff, and apparently did a good job. Yet, because I didn't find find dealing with academic prima donnas particularly pleasant and knew that my parents were going to be requiring a lot of attention in their final years, I decided to officially retire in 2001, before the death of my parents in 2002 and 2003. My activities since retirement provide most of the material on this website.