Official Story
Richard Tsien was born in China, came to the U.S. before he was 2, grew up in the NYC area during the Sputnik era and graduated from MIT with a bachelor's and master's degree in Electrical Engineering. He spent 4 years in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and junior research fellow, graduating with a D.Phil. in Biophysics and focusing on the ionic basis of cardiac action potentials. Skipping the postdoc stage to avoid the Vietnam war draft, he joined the faculty at Yale where he rose to full Professor. He switched from cardiac electrophysiology to neuronal biophysics in 1985-1988 and from Yale to Stanford, where he founded a new Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology from the ground up. He spent 23 yr at Stanford, co-directing a pan-Neuroscience organization, before moving to NYU in 2011 to start the Neuroscience Institute with colleagues at the Med Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the Axelrod and Gerard Prizes of SfN.
Unofficial Story
RWT and his family went through immigrant family struggles during the McCarthy era. He tried to assimilate and was not particularly hardworking as a high school student. That changed at MIT - engineering was mostly theoretical and wonderfully taught. Still, studying was balanced with sports (crew, wrestling) and student politics. Entry into biology in England was not a personal epiphany but the result of persistent proselytizing by a friend, Robert Macdonald, now chair of Neurology at Vanderbilt. Working on the brain became the goal in Oxford, but Denis Noble, RWT's chosen advisor, was focused on heart and RWT (so easily distracted) joined him for cardiac experimentation and a book on cable theory with Julian Jack. The only sign of the future neuroscientist was a pop essay about understanding vision, inspired by ideas of Rene Descartes. Parts of RWT's thesis were pioneering but another aspect was wrong in a major way -- a traumatic experience. Early on at Yale, RWT was experimenting solo, slow to get his lab started and late to publish although on target about the importance of neuromodulation. His first paper, in Nature New Biology, involved conflict about authorship with a senior colleague that seems silly now but was very awkward then. One of his lab's major discoveries, of the calcium channels that support neurotransmission, was highly controversial - not the last of scientific disputes. RWT had a good relationship with his late brother RYT of GFP fame - collaborations helped. RWT has always enjoyed asking questions but quickly became aware of how annoying they can be to some in the audience. Teaching and mentoring has always been a joy. In the first part of his career, RWT behaved like his competitive father, but the balance has tipped to taking after his altruistic and socially conscious mother, who never forgot her experience of being given away as a young girl in a highly male chauvinist Chinese society. Balancing the inborn desire to be best and first vs. the aspiration to be kind and helpful remains an issue but mom is winning. The move to NYU has provided new challenges and sources of happiness to help keep gloom and doom at bay. It helps to be married to a psychologist who loves NYC and close by two adult kids who live in Manhattan and work in Brooklyn or vice-versa.