American Society for Cell Biology -
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Published on: 4/30/2008
Last Visited: 4/30/2008
On September 1, Landis became Director of NINDS, an institute with an intramural staff of 900, a budget of $1.5 billion, and the scientific responsibility for 600 diseases.Approximately 90 percent of the budget is spent outside the walls of NINDS, making the institute a primary supporter of biomedical research on the brain and nervous system in the U.S., from basic research to advanced clinical trials.
Colleagues and friends say that Story Landis is the perfect match for a difficult job."The scientific work that Story is best known for today is on the fate determination of neural crest cells in the autonomic nervous system, that is, how a given cell decides to use one transmitter and not another," says Gerald Fischbach, who first met Story Landis at Harvard in the mid-70s and was later her boss as Director of NINDS from 1998-2000 when Landis was Scientific Director.
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Neurons were considered anything but plastic in the mid-70s when Landis, still a post-doc, joined the Harvard lab of David Potter and Ed Furshman.
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Landis had the good fortune to find a place in the HMS neuroscience lab of Richard Sidman.
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"Richard was several decades ahead of his time," says Landis.
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With Sidman, Landis embarked on an ultrastructural study of Purkinje cells in mutant mice with a characteristic "rounded up" malformation in cerebellar mitochondria.
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In 1971, Dennis Landis finished his MD degree and matched for an internship in San Diego."So I packed up 50 cages of mutant mice and followed my husband to UCSD where I was lucky enough to find a place in John O'Brien's lab," Landis recalls.Two years later, Dennis Landis joined the U.S. Public Health Service and the NINDS intramural lab of Tom Reese.
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"So I packed up my 50 cases of mutant mice again and moved with him," says Landis.She found mouse and bench space with Floyd Bloom at the NIMH where she dashed to the end of her thesis work in 1973 and stayed on a year as a post-doc.Then Dennis Landis matched for a Neurology Fellowship at Harvard.Story Landis moved once again, without the mice, back to Harvard and her fateful association with neuronal plasticity.In 1978, Landis got her own appointment and lab in the Neurobiology Department at HMS.
In 1985, both Landises left Harvard for new positions at the Case Western University School of Medicine in Cleveland.Story Landis says she was hired to fill "the cell biologist niche" in the Pharmacology Department, but soon found herself on a committee charged with finding ways to grow the neurosciences at Case.She was instrumental in creating a Center for Neuroscience that eventually morphed into a Department of Neuroscience in 1990, which Landis served as Chair in 1990.In the meantime, Dennis Landis prospered in the clinically-oriented Department of Neurology and became its Chair.
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Hall saw in Landis a widely respected neurobiologist who had demonstrated real administrative flair at Case Western, guided by her "superb sense of scientific quality."Hall was looking for "an administrative and scientific leader, not just a caretaker," and he offered Landis the post of Scientific Director, responsible for the NINDS intramural program.It was a wonderful offer, but a difficult choice, Story Landis remembers."It can be difficult with two professional careers to find positions that are equally challenging.Dennis and I decided that this was a great job for me and that being Chairman of Neurology at Case was a great job for Dennis."
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"I converted Dennis to bird watching," she says."Dennis was already quite a good photographer so I guess he learned to tolerate the birds.When we go birding, he carries binoculars and a camera and I just carry binoculars.Dennis has taken some amazing photographs, especially on the trips we've taken to Africa and Alaska.
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