‘Muscle superman’ Cristobal Guillermo dos Remedios: five decades of endless energy

There are not that many academic colleagues that you will meet in your life that has unlimited reserves of energy (read, more than half a century) characterized by his multidisciplinary academic knowledge and holistic view on the broader aspects of scholastic life. Without reservations, I can attest that all of his students, colleagues and collaborators acknowledge his listening ear and feel inspired over and over again to go on with the quest to unravel the fine machinery of muscle biology. Hence, his nickname ‘muscle superman’ that many of us allocated to him.

My first introduction to Cris’ work dates back to 1999 when I was preparing a public lecture as part of my doctoral defence at the Free University of Brussels. I lively remember the moment when I received a reprint of one of Cris’ papers that I had to order directly from the British Library. The 26 pages-long paper titled ‘Actin and the actomyosin interface: a review’ contained a wealth of information and was just what I was after to support my future outlooks (Dos Remedios and Moens 1995). The paper succeeded to cover in-depth all current knowledge on the actin-myosin machinery. Besides a historical perspective on the topic matter, this manuscript included a thorough summary on the actomyosin interface and an in-depth overview of approaches to research the macromolecular organization of this subcellular force engine. It was this paper that sparked my interests to research the presence of actin-myosin in liver sinusoidal endothelial cells through immunogold labeling studies. This is one example how Cris, at that time, unknowingly directed my future liver endothelial work. Although not directly related to muscle biology, the intersection could be readily found in my ongoing interests on how actin-binding agents alter actin filaments—and potentially myosin organisation—thereby potentially regulating endothelial fenestrae contraction vs. relaxation. When I joined the University of Sydney in 2004, I was dazed when I ran into Cris. Despite reading his work in detail, I had no idea that his institution was the same one I just joined. Ever since this chance meeting with Cris, ongoing collaborative projects have been a given, including many inspiring coffee meetings.

Diving into research engines such as Clarivate Analytics underpins the above reflections/comments in a more objective manner (Fig. 1). Using the search terms ‘dos Remedios Cris’ resulted in 335 hits within the ‘Web of Science Core Collection’ from which over 200 are journal articles, nearly 100 hundred meeting abstracts and around 30 proceeding papers. The latter two metrics demonstrate his passionate communication of science with the aim to inspire others. This networking approach often initiated successful new collaborative research projects. Peering into the ‘countries/region-tree map’ supports that statement with North America, Europe and East-Asia, respectively, as his top three destinations for platform presentations. The USA, England, the Netherlands, Germany and Japan are the top five countries he co-authored papers with and amounted to about 60% of his published work. San Francisco, Amsterdam, London and Tokyo seem to belong to his list of favourite cities without naming the various institutions and people he had collaborations with at those places. Besides his core research agenda in cardiac cardiovascular systems, the multidisciplinary nature of his work ranked in order, cover the disciplines of biophysics, biochemistry molecular biology, cell biology, biochemical research methods, physiology and other multidisciplinary sciences. Other noteworthy research outside his muscle work include work on the development of antibody microarrays (and biomarkers) for diagnostic purposes and the development of various fluorescent-based approaches for molecular analysis. Besides his research, Cris also managed to allocate significant time and effort for service to the community, from which the establishment of the ‘Sydney Heart Bank’ and his role as editor in the early days of biophysical reviews are the most notable.

Fig. 1.

Summary of Web of Science literature analysis from 1970 to-date, utilizing the search term 'dos Remedios Cris'. Shown from top to bottom are the outputs sorted per paper category, country and research discipline

One thing is for sure, it is not all a matter of luck and hard work as Prof. dos Remedios recently wrote (Dos Remedios 2019) but also in maintaining the ongoing muscle contractions which he apparently finds by balancing family life, working and playing golf. We are all looking forward to reading his publications to come after his recent move to the Mechanobiology Laboratory at the Victor Chang Heart Institute, Australia’s leading cardiac research institute. Watch the work to come!