Setsuro Ebashi
Ebashi Setsuro (Japanese江桥 节 郎, born August 31, 1922 in Tokyo, † 17 July 2006 in Okazaki ) was a Japanese physiologist and pioneer in the field of research of signal transduction in living cells. He succeeded in the early 1950s, inter alia, evidence that calcium ions play an important role in muscle contraction itself - a finding that is mentioned in every textbook of physiology for decades.
Life
Ebashi already caught the eye as a child by his special talent, because he skipped a class, both in elementary school and in middle school. Later he was admitted to the Dai -ichi High School, which at that time the most prestigious high school in Japan. After his studies, he was appointed to the University of Tokyo at the age of 36 years as professor of pharmacology.
Among his outstanding achievements is that he proved largely single-handedly, as action potentials that arrive on the surface of muscle fibers that can cause a reduction of protein filaments.
Already in the 1940s, Albert Szent- Györgyi had the biochemical basis of muscle contraction largely clarified. Jean Hanson and Hugh Huxley had then described the structure and the importance of active in the muscle proteins actin and myosin. Remained unclear, however, was how it manages the nerves that trigger the contraction of muscle fibers.
Ebashi discovered that in the absence of calcium ions, each contraction is absent, even if abundant ATP is present. Conversely, a violent contraction may be caused even if only traces of calcium - a micromolar - are added. Other researchers before him had overlooked the calcium - dependence, since their experiments were apparently always slightly contaminated by calcium traces from laboratory glassware and chemical reagents.
Despite its equivocal evidence Ebashis studies were not given much attention until the early 60s into it. Most colleagues were for years the view that a simple inorganic molecule could be in no way responsible for the control of muscle contraction, and suggested that this role zukomme a yet undiscovered, complex organic molecule.
Back in 2000, Ebashi had suffered a stroke. In an obituary of the journal Nature, they said, Ebashi had " the world's most respected scientists in the fields of physiology and Pharmacy" part.
He received the 1968 Asahi Prize and he was awarded the Order of Culture, among others, the highest honor the Japanese characters for researchers. In 1979 he received the Croonian Lecture of the Royal Society, awarded the International Prize for Biology in 1999. In 1971 he was elected a member of the Scholars Academy Leopoldina.