Bertil Hille shares Lasker Award for ion channel research

Dr. Bertil Hille, UW professor of physiology and biophysics in the School of Medicine, will be a co-recipient of the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award at ceremonies in New York City on Friday. He is being honored for pioneering research on ion channels, the tiny pores in cell membranes that govern the electrical potential of cells, thereby generating nerve impulses and controlling muscle contraction, heart rhythm and hormone secretion.

Dr. Bertil Hille

The Lasker awards, also given in clinical medical research and for special achievement in medical science, are sometimes called “America’s Nobels.” Administered by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, they are among the most prestigious in medical research. According to the Foundation, 61 Lasker Award recipients have subsequently received Nobel prizes.

Hille shares the 1999 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Drs. Clay Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Roderick MacKinnon of Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They have also done pioneering ion channel research.

Hille and Armstrong “believed” in ion channels long before they were proven to exist. Hille notes that they envisioned “holes in membranes” in the early 1960s and were convinced that the holes had gates that opened and closed somehow. “But we were working on a black box, with none of the equipment that exists today. We believed that ions have to go through the right size hole to get into a cell, so the holes or channels must come in different sizes. And we wanted to know whether the gates that control ion flow are on the inside or outside of channels,” he adds.

Hille’s interest in the field took hold while he was a graduate student at Rockefeller University, where he received his Ph.D. in life sciences 1967. Working with nerve axons from frogs, Hille showed that channels are independent physical entities in the membrane, each site generating electrical signals that make it possible for cells to talk to one another. Selective blocking by several neurotoxins proved that there are discrete and separate channels for sodium ions and for potassium ions. Before his discoveries, many scientists assumed that ions could flow across a cell membrane at any point.

He went on to demonstrate how ion channels were sized to distinguish between the tiny sodium and potassium ions.

Hille first published on sodium channel physiology in Nature in 1966. His 1984 book, Ionic Channels in Excitable Membranes, is a classic text in the field.

Born in Connecticut in 1940, Hille earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Yale University in 1962 and went on to graduate work at the Rockefeller University. His postgraduate work included a year at Cambridge University in England.

He joined the UW faculty as an assistant professor of physiology and biophysics in 1968 and became a full professor in 1974.

He has received numerous other national and international honors, including a senior U.S. scientists award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health, a Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for neuroscience research, and the Louisa Gross Horwitz prize from Columbia University.

Hille was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. ¶