(Meanwhile, one night during the winter, 1 week after Loeb had arrived for a vacation in Bermuda, Jacques Loeb died at the Biological Station in the room that was just above Blinks’s room.) Blinks had collaborated with Osterhout and Loeb in critical membrane transport work at the Rockefeller Institute and at the Bermuda Biological Station in the 1920s. This work included some of the earliest measurements of ion transport across cell membranes, of membrane conductance and transmembrane electric potential. The work formed the

basis of our understanding of electrical activities in cells and was incorporated into animal research as well as plant physiology (Briggs et al. 1990). Blinks measured the fundamental parameters of the environmental find more variability of algal cells such as pH, various concentrations of the major ionic salts, temperature, IWR1 pressure, and light to elucidate the environmental variables acting on algal cells versus Stattic cell line their electric characteristics (Blinks 1928, 1929, 1933, 1936a, b). He continued working with Osterhout into the early 1930s. At this time, the Great Depression hit the Rockefeller Institute’s funding. For Blinks, a more serious problem was that

Winthrop Osterhout suffered a massive heart attack in the winter of 1931. Blinks had previously been courted by Stanford University for a faculty position and been asked to teach at a summer session at Stanford. Upon Osterhout’s illness, Stanford offered Blinks a position in 1931. Blinks moves to Stanford and begins photosynthesis research Blinks was an associate professor and eventually a full professor at Stanford University’s main campus from 1931 to 1943. During 1943–1964, Blinks served as the Director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station (Pacific Grove). In 1955, he was elected a member of the

National Academy of Sciences, USA. He left Stanford only five times: (1) for a year as Vice President (1954–1955) of Interleukin-3 receptor the National Science Foundation under William McElroy’s presidency; (2) for a sabbatical (1940–1941) ostensibly at the Carnegie Institutes’ Tortugas Marine Laboratories (which was unavailable during World War II, so he stayed in Key West, Florida to study giant marine plant cell membranes); (3) another sabbatical in Stockholm, Sweden at the Nobel Institute; (4) a third sabbatical in 1949 in Cambridge, England on a Guggenheim award; and (5) at age 65, upon retirement from Stanford, Blinks also participated in the building of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1965–1973).