Zhuo-Hua Pan
Chinese neuroscientist (born 1956)
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Related on Lably
Through Neuron and Nature (journal)
Education and career
Pan was born 1956 in Pujiang County of Jinhua, Zhejiang, China. After graduating from Jinhua No. 1 High School, he entered the University of Science and Technology of China in 1978 and earned his B.S. degree in 1982. He earned his M.S. in 1984 from the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and became an instructor at Zhejiang University afterwards.
In 1986, he moved to the United States to further his studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He earned his Ph.D. in 1990 and conducted postdoctoral research for another year.
From 1991 to 1997 he was an instructor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. In 1998, he became an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital. He moved to Wayne State University School of Medicine in 1999, and was promoted to associate professor in 2003 and professor in 2007. In 2011, he was appointed the Edward T. and Ellen K. Dryer Endowed Professor of Ophthalmology and Kresge Eye Institute, and Scientific Director of the Ligon Research Center of Vision.
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Optogenetics
In the early 2000s, Pan envisioned implanting a light-sensitive protein, which converts light to electrical signals for neurons, into the eye to cure blindness. The method is now known as optogenetics. In the summer of 2004, he used a virus carrying the channelrhodopsin DNA to infect the ganglion cells in the eyes of blind mice, and successfully detected electrical activity when the cells were stimulated with light, a "revolutionary" first step in potentially restoring eyesight to the blind.
Pan and his collaborator, Alexander Dizhoor, submitted their paper reporting their work to Nature in November 2004. However, they were directed to the specialized journal Nature Neuroscience, which rejected the paper. In early 2005, they submitted it to the Journal of Neuroscience, but were again rejected. In May 2005, Pan presented his work at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology conference in Florida, which became the clearest public evidence of his invention.
Around the same time, other scientists around the world were doing similar research to Pan. In August 2005, Nature Neuroscience, the same journal that had rejected Pan's paper, published a paper by Stanford University scientists Edward Boyden and Karl Deisseroth describing their work using channelrhodopsin to make neurons detect light. Their research was hailed as a major breakthrough and caught the attention of mainstream media including The New York Times. When the journal Neuron finally published Pan's paper in April 2006, it was met with indifference.
Boyden and Deisseroth have since been rewarded with major grants and prizes, including The Brain Prize and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with a $3 million prize for each scientist, while Pan only won awards from his own university. In 2016, Stat News published a report which credits Pan as the inventor of optogenetics and brought attention to his contributions.
RetroSense Therapeutics
Based on Pan's research, Sean Ainsworth started the company RetroSense Therapeutics in 2009. The company develops treatment for the genetic disease retinitis pigmentosa, which causes blindness and affects about 100,000 people in the United States. In 2016, Allergan bought RetroSense for $60 million.