SUBJECT:

Campus Memorial Service for Dr. John Newport

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

A memorial service will be held for Dr. John Newport, Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, UCSD Division of Biological Sciences, on Friday, Feb. 3rd, at 4:00 PM at the Ida and Cecil Green Faculty Club at UCSD. All of us who knew John will miss him greatly. Excepts from his obituary follow.

Eduardo R. Macagno Dean Division of Biological Sciences

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John W. Newport
1951 - 2005

John W. Newport, an internationally recognized cell biologist and a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, died of pancreatic cancer on December 26 in Del Mar. He was 54.

Professor Newport joined the UCSD faculty as an assistant professor of biology in 1983. He was noted for his discoveries about how proteins in the cell regulate the timing of early developmental events, including how a single protein regulates cell division in all organisms. He also elucidated the mechanisms by which cells assemble and disassemble the nucleus, the compartment that holds an organism's genetic instructions, and published numerous articles about his discoveries in Science, Cell and other prestigious scientific journals.

Dr. Newport was born October 30, 1951 in Redwood City, CA, and graduated from Reed College with a degree in biology in 1975. He received his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Oregon in 1979 and spent the following four years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, where he began his investigations of the basic processes of the cell.

Dr. Marc Kirschner, chair of the Systems Biology Department at the Harvard Medical School, who oversaw Newport's research at UC San Francisco, recalled that Newport's chemistry training early on provided him with a different perspective how to tackle complex biological problems. "You could see his physical chemist's mind at work, the way he approached complex biological problems very mechanistically," Kirschner said. "He was a very deep thinking conceptual person who was not afraid to tackle complex problems. And what was remarkable about John was that he could come up with simple ways, simple experiments, to tackle some of the most complex biological problems."

Dr. Newport was widely admired among the UCSD faculty for his innovative and imaginative approach to answering scientific problems. "He was a highly distinguished, internationally recognized scientist who, over the course of his career, made numerous seminal discoveries elucidating the mechanisms by which cells divide," said Richard A. Firtel, professor and chair of cell and developmental biology at UCSD.

"John had a major impact on cell biology and his contributions on the control of cell cycles will be cited for decades to come," said William J. McGinnis, a professor of biology and close colleague of John's. In the early 1980s, Dr. Newport, with his colleagues Drs. Douglass Jane Forbes and Marc Kirschner, discovered that a cell's nucleus could be chemically assembled and dissembled in a test tube.

These accomplishments and others led the National Institutes of Health to award Newport in 2000 with a 10-year merit grant, an honor given to only the highest performing scientists funded by the agency, and to his election in 2001 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

According to Marc Kirschner, Dr. Newport's approach to science distinguished him as a trailblazer, seeking to answer questions no one else had considered. "He became less interested if he knew half the field was working on the same problems," Kirschner said. "He was always looking for things no one else had touched."

During the last several years of his life, Dr. Newport had been working on the genetic basis of sleep and sleep disorders, an area that few biologists had probed.

"John was an incredibly creative scientist, with the rare combination of confidence and modesty," said Bill McGinnis. "He was almost invariably right, but he didn't browbeat his colleagues until they believed him. He let his data speak for him."

At UCSD, Dr. Newport also made contributions to improve the quality of academic life. "John used his leadership ability to raise the quality of science and academic life at UCSD," said Rick Firtel. "During the past year, he was chair of the university's committee on academic promotions, a position of major importance to the campus faculty and the overall well-being of the campus."

He was also active in the Del Mar community, frequently volunteering at his son's and daughter's schools and personally sponsoring a recreational soccer team in the area whose jerseys bore the advertisement "UCSD Biology."

John Newport is survived by his former spouse, Dr. Douglass Jane Forbes of Del Mar; their two children, Katherine and Joshua of Del Mar; a brother, James Newport of Del Mar and Las Vegas; and a sister, Julie Newport of Hong Kong.