Julio Vergara, By ariel escobar

This post was written by Dr. Ariel Escobar in preparation for ​the Julio Vergara’s Lecture that Dr. Escobar will present at the annual SOBLA meeting in 2021.

Julio Vergara was born in Santiago, Chile. He is the son of a family of intellectuals and statesmen; indeed, his father was the president of the Bank of Chile. After finishing high school, Julio decided to study medicine at the Catholic University of Chile. There he became friends with another outstanding Chilean scientist, Pancho Bezanilla. Pancho’s girlfriend was the daughter of a very famous physiologist, the “Loco” Luco. One night, Pancho invited Julio to a party in Luco’s house. That night was an inflection point in Julio’s life. They met with “Guayo” Rojas, Guayo convinced Julio and Pancho to quit medical school and move with him to Montemar to do electrophysiology. Montemar, a small lab in the north of Reñaca, Viña del Mar, become the cradle of biophysics and electrophysiology in Latin America. Although Julio’s family was not happy at all, moving was a decisive step in Julio’s wonderful career. Julio was one of the first scientists in the world to record Ca2+ currents. The experiments were performed in the giant Chilean barnacle, the “Picoroco”. This work was the central part of his Ph.D. thesis that was presented at the Catholic University of Chile. After graduating, Julio completed 2 postdocs. The First one was with Toshio Narahashi at Duke University and the second with Stanley Rappaport at the NIH. After completing his postdoctoral training, Julio returned to Chile where he became an Associate Professor in the School of Sciences and the School of Medicine at the University of Chile. In 1976, Julio decided to emigrate to the USA. After being a Visiting scholar at U Penn, he got an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Physiology at UCLA. He spent his whole career at UCLA and reached the Distinguished Professor position of Physiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine.
Since the beginning of his career, Julio has been intrigued by the relationship between electrical excitation and mechanical contraction in skeletal muscle. Moreover, Julio has been a leader in the study of skeletal excitation-contraction coupling for more than 40 years. He had made numerous influential contributions to this scientific field. For example, he was the first to identify the delay between the action potential and Ca2+ release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum. He was the first scientist to perform Ca2+ imaging in skeletal muscle. He was the first physiologist to perform flash photolysis and use it as a tool to study the Ca2+ dynamics in skeletal muscle. He was the first to evaluate the propagation of the action potential in the t-tubules using potentiometric dyes. He functionally identified for the first time where Ca2+ release sites were located in a single sarcomere in skeletal muscle. During his whole career, Julio has been a quantitative physiologist. His creativity was evident by his ability to combine a mathematical approach with an experimental method to study excitation contraction-coupling.
But the most important feature of Julio as a scientist is not all his scientific accomplishments. The most important thing about Julio is his passion for science. Science is not for tepid people, and Julio has never been one. Meeting Julio at a Biophysical Society Meeting in 1991 in San Francisco has been the most important thing that happened in my scientific life. I will always have a gigantic affection and an immeasurable admiration for him.