Dr. Felix Strumwasser died April 19, 2007, after a long and productive career studying neuronal function, behavior, and circadian rhythms. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, British West Indies, he received his education at UCLA, earning a BA in zoology at the young age of 19 in 1953, and a PhD in neurophysiology and zoology with T.H. Bullock, in 1957. During a postdoctoral period at the National Institute of Mental Health and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, he performed inventive neurophysiological studies, including long-term recordings from the brain of ground squirrels. These achievements enabled him to study circadian rhythms and even hibernation at the single-neuron level in mammals. Strumwasser recognized the need for simpler and more accessible nervous systems, and helped pioneer the use of the marine mollusc Aplysia californica as an important preparation for neurobiology.
These studies caught the attention of the legendary California Institute of Technology invertebrate neurophysiologists, Antonie van Harreveld and Cornelius A.G. Wiersma, who persuaded Strumwasser to join the Caltech faculty as associate professor of biology. He set up a large sea water aquarium system on the 3rd floor of the Kerckhoff lab building, requiring regular deliveries by tanker truck from the Pacific Ocean. Strumwasser stayed at Caltech for 20 years, where he was a pioneer in the application of cellular and biochemical techniques to single identified neurons. He and his colleagues studied single neuron activity, neuronal and hormonal bases of behavior, especially the nature and activity of the egg-laying hormone, and the neural mechanisms of sleep and circadian rhythm. He continued his technical innovations, and his laboratory was the first at Caltech to incorporate computers into scientific instruments for biological studies.
In 1984, Strumwasser left Caltech for the Boston University School of Medicine, then moving in 1987 to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, and later in 1992 to the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. There, he played a role in the discovery of cyclic ADP-ribose as an important intracellular messenger that mobilizes calcium. From 1993 to 1994, he also served as Program Director for Neuronal and Glial Mechanisms at the National Science Foundation.
Strumwasser was very generous as a mentor and encouraged his students and postdoctoral fellows to publish single-author papers. Steve Arch, Jon Jacklet, Bertram Peretz, Arnold Eskin, Leonard Kaczmarek, Robert Meech, and Douglas Eaton began or continued productive careers with such excellent papers from Strumwasser's laboratory. His students include Gerald Audesirk, who is the author of an important text on biology, Arlene Chiu, Barry Rothman, Kent Jennings, Arthur Roach, and Duncan Stuart.
Strumwasser's family suggests that gifts in his memory could go either to the MBL or to Caltech.
In the '60s, Felix was enthusiastically active in undergraduate education at Caltech. His neurobiology course was rigorous and required students to spontaneously ask questions during lecture....a scary prospect if one was not attentive or prepared! The course laboratory was especially advanced for its time, for Felix covered all aspects of instrumentation design and construction and allowed us to stick Aplysia neurons and do our own intracellular recordings. Overall, Felix conveyed a strong sense of excitement for the subject, and a number of us were inspired to become neuroscientists. -Rock Levinson