David Emery Wolfe, MD January 3, 1933–June 3, 2014

Abstract

David was born on January 3, 1933, in Seattle, Washington, to Evan Uphus and Polly Emery. He was originally named Reed Uphus, but after his parents' divorce, his mother married Joseph Wolfe, and Reed was formally adopted and renamed David Emery Wolfe. He was an avid skier in his youth. He attended the University of Washington before serving as a hospital corpsman in the US Navy during the Korean War, although he never saw combat. After this, he matriculated at Columbia College, New York, beginning what was to be a lifelong passion for living in that city. His academic career was nothing short of brilliant; he graduated Phi Beta Kappa Summa Cum Laude in Philosophy with the class of 1956. He then studied medicine at Columbia Physicians & Surgeons where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society in his junior year. He received an MD in 1960. That same year, he married Shelagh Foreman. Instead of taking clinical training after medical school, he was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Neuroanatomical Sciences of what was then National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness of the National Institutes of Health. David was interested in the newly emerging field of electron microscopy and began to apply this technology to issues in neuroscience. In 1962, working with Julius Axelrod, he was first author on an article in Science entitled, “Localizing tritiated norephinephrine in sympathetic axons by electron microscopic autoradiography” (1). This was long before immunogold techniques had become available and accomplishing the use of tritium autoradiography in conjunction with electron microscopy was a true tour de force . The article contained a 3-part illustration that has become an iconic photographic image in the history of neuroscience. For the first time, it clearly demonstrated that the granulated vesicles …