Profile of Junying Yuan

Abstract

Cell biologist Junying Yuan vividly remembers the moment when, during her second year of graduate school at Harvard University in 1983, a thin, restless Huntington’s disease patient was wheeled into her “Neurobiology of Disease” class. “I was appalled that modern medicine could do little for him,” she says. “He and others suffering from neurodegenerative diseases made a lasting impression on me. I became emotionally motivated to try to help these patients.” Photograph of Junying Yuan. Image courtesy of Aaron Washington for Harvard Medical School. Over the subsequent three decades, Yuan and her team have made major discoveries concerning the molecular mechanisms regulating cell death involved in normal development and a wide range of disorders. Her achievements include discovery of the regulated necrotic cell death pathway termed “necroptosis” and its key mediator, the kinase receptor-interacting serine/threonine-protein 1 (RIPK1). She and her colleagues also discovered the evolutionarily conserved role of caspase enzymes in regulating mammalian apoptosis. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017, Yuan reviews her team’s research on RIPK1, a kinase that is now a pharmaceutical target, in her Inaugural Article (IA). Yuan was born in Shanghai, China, to a family of scholars. Her father and mother were both professors at Fudan University Shanghai Medical College. Yuan’s paternal grandfather Kaiji was an organic chemistry professor at the college. During China’s cultural revolution, a sociopolitical movement from 1966 to 1976, universities closed and many textbooks were burned. The period adversely affected Yuan’s family, and Yuan thought factory work or farming was her only vocational option. Her high-school teacher Zhaiyang Lu, however, recognized her talent and urged Yuan to press on with her education. Since the only local science textbooks, dated to before the Cultural Revolution, were locked in the school library, Lu procured the books for her. Before returning them, …