Susan Lee Lindquist (1949 2016) It is personal
It was Saturday, October 29, 2016. I was sitting at the organizers' table waiting for the opening of the Eighth International Symposium on Heat Shock Proteins in Biology and Medicine, held at the Hilton Old Town Alexandria, VA. Our Principal Organizer, Stuart Calderwood, walked in the room and sat down next to me. He leaned toward me and whispered BSusan Lindquist has died^ Stuart is a professor at Brigham and Women's Hospital where she died. The news came as a shock, as we did not know that she had been terminally ill. Susan supported this symposium series with her characteristic enthusiastic and mind expanding talks since its early gatherings at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. When she could not attend, she would send a senior member of her lab to participate. There was always a session on Hsp90 to attract her attention, and since its creation this particular meeting has maintained an eclectic bent, a surprising new direction, an unexpectedmodel system, an unsuspected new result, so characteristic of Susan's own path through science. We wanted to do something to memorialize Susan's life and professional contributions. Many of us were feeling the need to come together to express both our gratitude for all that Susan had done for our science and to relieve some of the sadness over the loss of a wonderful colleague and friend. We decided to begin the symposium banquet with a champagne toast in remembrance. Stuart Calderwood gave the eulogy and led the toast with eloquent words of praise for Susan and of comfort for her family, friends, and colleagues (Fig. 1) I met Susan in 1982 at the inaugural Cold Spring Harbor meeting on Heat Shock. Her talk was about heat shock regulation in Drosophila and Yeast. Ironically, we had overlapped in the same department in graduate school at Harvard University in the early 1970s but did not meet. This was mainly because I was drafted into the US Army early in my second semester and sent to Vietnam. By the time I returned to Harvard, Susan had started her Ph.D. thesis research in Matthew Meselson's laboratory, and I was spending most of my time at Harvard Medical School in Boston, so I rarely visited the Biological Laboratories in Cambridge after that. In autobiographical writings, Susan tells the story of how Professor Meselson was rarely available to her when she was looking for a thesis topic as he was busy with chemical and biological warfare issues. In another twist of fate, I was sitting at lunch with Mat Meselson in the old Hotel Continental in downtown Saigon about the same time, discussing how the defoliant Agent Orange was being used to destroy old growth mangrove forests in South Vietnam. Mat went on to complete a very important study proving that Agent Orange had been sprayed on the crops of civilians as well as enemy combatants in Vietnam. But his best achievement from that time may have been to foster the successful completion of Susan's graduate program. Susan, then Susan Lee Lindquist McKenzie, successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled BProtein and RNA synthesis induced by heat treatment in Drosophila melanogaster tissue culture cells^ at Harvard University in 1976. I know this because I requested a copy of her thesis through the University of Connecticut interlibrary loan a couple of years later. My student and I read it cover to cover. It took some courage to work on Drosophila heat shock in those days because quite a few biologists considered it a laboratory artifact at worst and a Bcuriosity of Drosophila biology^ at best, a statement I heard more than a few times! I later learned that Susan was seeking a Lawrence E. Hightower Lawrence.Hightower@uconn.edu
Cell Stress and Chaperones