Oliver Baker

Oliver's work as a graduate-student scientist and postdoc dealt with the invisible underpinnings of nerve impulses--miniature tidal-waves of electricity that course through the microscopically fine fibers connecting nerve cells. Each impulse is birthed and transported by an as-if orchestrated opening and closing of portholes in the fiber lining, through which charged atoms ("ions") rush in and out in a few thousandths of a second. Oliver's research in Ehud Isacoff's lab at UC Berkeley helped answer a fifty year-old question: How does a porthole know when to open? His 1996 paper, in which he shared primary authorship with Peter Larsson, made the news pages of Science magazine and capped, along with a few others, a "wildly exciting period," in the words of one great man of the field. The portholes are called "voltage-gated ion channels."