From this organismal and ecophysiological basis, he was able to delineate essential questions and then to develop procedures and methodologies to study them. Blinks’s qualities as a scientist, a summary One of the fundamental characteristics of Lawrence GDC-973 Blinks was his unquenchable curiosity about the way in which plants responded to various stimuli. All former colleagues and students recalled their shared moments of discovery of new algal responses. Such moments were

highly elating to him and his colleagues; in fact a bottle of wine from his own vineyard was often opened at the moment of a new discovery as Barbara Pope had described when the oscillatory phenomena was discovered, whereas normally his manner was very self-effacing. In the early years (1920–1944), when his focus was directed toward membrane transport in giant algal cells, their ion permeability, and their transport system, he made a series of discoveries about the effects of light, pH, pressure, and various electrolytes and solutes on the ion and water transport in Valonia, Halicystis, Derbesia, Boergesenia, and Nitella, among other species (see e.g., Blinks and Pope 1961). In 1938, he turned

a portion of his research attention to algal photosynthetic responses and the chromatic transients. In his later years (1967–1989), this consuming thirst for biological understanding led him to investigate the oscillatory phenomena in giant algal cells in response to light as well as Idasanutlin a series of other stimuli and to return to experimenting with giant cells (see e.g., Blinks and Pope 1961; Blinks 1971). In these oscillatory phenomena, a plant’s variability for its response to a stimulus was measured—usually via its bioelectric potential with a strip chart recorder versus time. The stimulus would be applied after the baseline potential for the specimen was established. Cell press Then, the specimen would begin an

oscillation, which was clearly recorded on a strip chart recorder as a function of time. Some oscillations lasted only several seconds, others went on many minutes. The relationship between stimulus and magnitude and length of response was the focus. These experiments required detailed data and reproducibility. Blinks examined a series of stimuli and responses which caused such oscillations and attempted to explain this very complex phenomenon which can be found in artificial membranes (Selegny 1976). Had Blinks been blessed with a bit more time, he no doubt would have synthesized the data he was Selleck Nirogacestat working on at the time of his death with an astute hypothesis of the underlying causal factors.