| | Principal Investigators
| Ichiji Tasaki , M.D. |
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Dr. Ichiji Tasaki is a busy man. He begins his day with a 2-mile walk from his home in Bethesda to his lab at NICHD. He works 7 days a week, publishing an average of two scientific articles a year in respected peer-reviewed journals. Such a fast pace would be impressive for anyone. It is especially so for NIH's most senior scientist. At 97 years old, Tasaki has been conducting ground-breaking research for twice as long as some of his colleagues have been alive.
Born in Japan in 1910, he attended medical school at the urging of his mother and received his M.D. in 1938. However, instead of practicing medicine, he decided to pursue his first love: biophysics. While in Japan, he |
studied vertebrate nerve fibers and discovered the insulating function of the myelin sheath, a material that speeds the conduction of nerve impulses. He also was the first to show that electrical impulses traveling along myelinated nerve cells actually "jump" between the breaks in the myelin wrapping, called nodes of Ranvier. His description of this process, termed saltatory conduction, is prominent in every biology textbook. The discoveries also provided the foundation for a better understanding of diseases such as multiple sclerosis, in which myelin is lost or damaged.
After World War II, Tasaki's research took him to England and to Switzerland, where he further studied the properties of nerve fibers. In 1951, he came to the United States to work at Washington University in St. Louis. While there, Tasaki and his colleagues demonstrated how vibrations that occur in the cochlea in response to sound are translated into electrical signals that the brain can interpret. This effort led to the development of the field of audiology, indirectly providing the basis for diagnosing and treating many hearing disorders. |
| Research Interests |
| Dr. Tasaki began his NIH career in 1953, at NINDS, then called the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Blindness. Later, when NIMH separated from that institute, he moved with the new institute, where he was a lab chief for 22 years. He is currently on detail to NICHD. Since coming to NIH, Tasaki has been studying the physical and chemical processes that occur in nerve membranes. |
| Representative Selected Recent Publications: |
- Tasaki I.: Repetitive abrupt structural changes in polyanionic gels: a comparison with analogous processes in nerve fibers. J Theor Biol., 236, 2-11, 2005.
- Tasaki I.: On the conduction velocity of nonmyelinated nerve fibers. J Integr Neurosci., 3: 115-24, 2004.
- Tasaki I., Matsumoto G.: On the cable theory of nerve conduction. Bull Math Biol, 64, 1069-82., 2002.
- Tasaki I: Spread of discrete structural changes in synthetic polyanionic gel: a model of propagation of a nerve impulse. J Theor Biol., 218, 497-505, 2002.
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Address:
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9000 Rockville Pike
Building 13, Room 3E25
Bethesda MD 20892
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| Phone: |
301-496-5195 |
| Email Dr. Tasaki |
| Fax: |
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| Lab Web Site: |
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