John was literally born on the move, while his Air Force family was relocating from Florida to Maine in 1946. He stayed on the move for the next thirty years, studying in Vienna while majoring in German literature at a small college in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; doing research at Erasmus University in Rotterdam while earning his MD and PhD degrees at Tufts University. He trained in clinical neuropathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he finally found his center of gravity in a pianist-turned-biochemist named Virginia Lee. The two married in 1979 and arrived at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, where they would forge an extraordinary, decades-spanning scientific partnership.

Although he would stay put geographically from that point onwards, eventually becoming the Director of the Institute on Aging and the William Maul Measey-Truman G. Schnabel, Jr., MD Professor of Geriatrics and Gerontology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, John never stopped moving in any other sense. He was early to realize that neurodegenerative disease would become a major problem, and major research focus, of our time. He entered the field of Alzheimer’s research against the advice of more senior colleagues, who told him it was “a morass.” John and Virginia proved that this was most definitely not the case, by creating guideposts in this terra nova with a foundational discovery every decade. The 1990s were marked by their discovery that the neurofibrillary tangles found in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease were composed of an abnormally phosphorylated form of the protein tau1; the 2000s by their discovery that a poorly characterized protein named TDP-43 comprised the signature inclusions of frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis2; and the 2010s by their work demonstrating that the cell-to-cell transmission of α-synuclein might lie at the heart of disease progression in Parkinson’s disease3. Many awards followed, among them the Potamkin Prize for Research in Pick’s, Alzheimer’s, and Related Disease (1996) and the Alzheimer’s Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2018).

Enjoying our latest content?
Log in or create an account to continue

  • Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team
  • Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research
Access through your institution

or

Sign in or create an account
Continue with Google
Continue with ORCiD