John Wilson Moore
| John Wilson Moore | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 1, 1920 Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Biophysics, Neuroscience, Computational Neuroscience, Physics |
| Institutions |
Duke University (1961–) NIH Naval Medical Research Institute Medical College of Virginia RCA University of Virginia (1941–1946) |
| Alma mater | Davidson College (B.S., 1941) |
| Known for | Tetrodotoxin, NEURON |
| Spouse | Ann Elizabeth Stuart (1943–) |
John Wilson Moore (born 1920) is an internationally known biophysicist who pioneered the emergent power of computers, beginning in the 1950s, to reveal how signals are generated, integrated, and then travel in neurons. He is well known for his discovery (with Toshio Narahashi), that the puffer fish toxin tetrodotoxin causes death by blocking the sodium ion channels that are responsible for nerve activity. Moore is currently emeritus professor of Neurobiology at Duke University Medical School where he has been a member of the faculty since 1961. Moore's NEURON simulator software, begun with and now carried forward by Michael Hines, is used worldwide. Moore received the Cole Award of the Biophysical Society in 1981.
Moore was born in Winston-Salem, NC, where his father was superintendent of the Winston-Salem public schools. He studied physics at Davidson College and entered a graduate program in physics at the University of Virginia in 1941. The day after Pearl Harbor he suddenly discovered he had been working on the project of developing a centrifuge to separate isotopes of uranium for the Manhattan Project. A second war project assignment, making an automated director for ships' guns using radar, awakened his interest in feedback systems that ultimately shaped his professional undertakings.
His first appointment was at RCA where he was heavily influenced by Art Vance, who among other inventions designed the operational amplifier that Moore later introduced into neurophysiology equipment. As his interests began to turn towards applying physics to biological problems, he joined the faculty at the Medical College of Virginia, and then the lab of Kenneth Stewart Cole, at the Naval Medical Research Institute and later the NIH. Moore became one of the earliest adopters of the voltage clamp technique, which Cole had invented and had shown to Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley who had used it to solve the problem of the action potential. Moving to Duke in 1961, Moore improved the voltage clamp, attracting collaborators from different universities and countries who brought him neurotoxins such as tetrodotoxin and red tide toxin to test on nerve axons. Much of this work was carried out on squid giant axons at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, where he still spends summers.
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