Stanford Professor Robert Schimke, a pioneer in biomedical sciences, dies at 81

By Bjorn Carey

Robert Tod Schimke, professor emeritus of biology at Stanford, was creative, unpretentious, irreverent, critical and supportive, often all at the same time.

Colleagues say that each of those qualities helped him make some of the most important discoveries and contributions to modern cell biology and genetics, while also being a fantastic mentor to dozens of young scientists.

Schimke died in Palo Alto on Sept. 6 at age 81 following several months of declining health.

Schimke was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1932. His father was a dentist, and his mother a pianist and piano teacher, laying the foundation for what would be a prosperous scientific and artistic career.

He was a brilliant student and school came easy to him he could do a week's worth of geometry homework in an hour. That left him plenty of time to get into trouble, and he described himself as a "holy terror" and a frequent visitor to the principal's office.

He came to Stanford as an undergraduate on full scholarship and although he was a gifted and avid painter, he studied pre-med, graduating in 1954. He then went to Stanford School of Medicine and began to focus on research, particularly cell biology. He graduated in 1958 and began a two-year residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He served in the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1960 to 1966, after which he returned to Stanford in the Pharmacology Department in the School of Medicine, serving as chair from 1970 to 1973. He then moved to the Department of Biological Sciences, which he chaired from 1978 to 1982.

It was during those years at Stanford that Schimke made significant, pioneering discoveries in four areas of biomedical sciences.

In the 1960s, he and his colleagues revolutionized the understanding of cell biology by showing that eukaryotic cells not only synthesize proteins but also degrade them, and that these processes are regulated by both genetic and environmental factors. Next, Schimke found that specific gene functions could be controlled by hormones.

Schimke's most famous discovery came in the late 1970s, when he and his graduate student Fred Alt provided evidence that the mammalian genome could undergo rapid change. They showed that cultured cells could develop resistance to a particular drug by amplifying the number of copies of specific genes.

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Stanford Professor Robert Schimke, a pioneer in biomedical sciences, dies at 81