Reflections on my longtime friendship with Mike Levine

It is my pleasure to say that Mike has been a great friend and mentor to me for about 45 years. I first met Mike when I arrived in 1974 from my undergraduate days at UC-Berkeley to study sleep physiology in the Department of Physiology at the UCLA medical school. It was probably in the spring quarter or so that I was asked to help out in one of the lab courses taught to medical students. That is when I met Mike, who I think was a postdoc, or maybe an assistant research scientist, for Nat Buchwald. I’m sure he has no recollection of that time, but I do, mainly because I had no clue as to what to do, and he was confident, as usual. So he showed me the ropes. For the rest of my graduate days, I would stop by the Buchwald lab and hang out with students there, including Marsha Melnick and Mike among others. Since I was an aspiring electrophysiologist and Mike was already established, he was quite helpful to me. He was also a great “psychiatrist” and helped me cope with the ups and downs of graduate school and my postdoctoral days at the UCLA dental school.

When I took a faculty position in the Department of Kinesiology, which shortly thereafter became the Department of Physiological Science, and now Integrative Biology and Physiology, I continued my relationship with Mike. He was very helpful in providing suggestions/guidance in writing my first NIH R01 grant. As time went on, we would actually collaborate on a few small projects and publish a paper or two together. In fact, for one of my sabbaticals I stayed at UCLA and spent two quarters working in Mike’s lab learning how to patch clamp neurons from brainstem slices—the “bread and butter” technique of my lab since then.

Though we spent time on and off discussing research, we also taught and developed undergraduate courses together. It was Mike who slightly twisted my arm to get involved in the development of the Undergraduate Neuroscience IDP and teach in the new Neuroscience IDP core class 101a. So, I convinced my Chair at the time that I was needed in the NS core 101a and let me out of teaching the physics 111A core course. Mike and I and various other faculty would teach that course and I would typically refer to Mike in the class as “my father” since he is somewhat of an icon at UCLA. The students thought that our friendly banter back and forth was pretty funny. Many years later, Judi Smith, Vice provost for education, asked me to develop a neuroscience general education cluster course for first year students. The course had to be interdisciplinary, with faculty from various departments. This was quite an undertaking because it was a two quarter course and a spring seminar. The first person I called on to help me develop this course was Mike. We worked together, recruited appropriate faculty from different departments, and got it off the ground. He taught anatomy and motor systems over both quarters, and not unexpectedly, got the best student reviews of all of us! Though now limited by a busy schedule, he still gives a few lectures to the students in that course.

Mike and I also served on a couple of committees together. I recall that we were both on the first NS IDP curriculum committee, when Stan Schein was Chair. Sometime after that, Mike became Chair and he asked me to be the Vice Chair of the Undergraduate program. That didn’t last too long because he was asked to take over as Chair of the Graduate IDP. Somehow, Dean Fred Eiserling thought I would be a suitable replacement for Mike (I am sure at Mike’s suggestion) and so I became the next Chair of the NS undergraduate IDP. That lasted 10 years, and during that time Mike and I had many discussions about both programs, most of which were out in the ocean on our kayaks! We also served on the UCLA Charges Committee together. After my first year, I told him about this committee and that I thought he would be a good person to also serve on it. So next I see, he is on it as well. I think, though I doubt he recalls this, that this was the first major University committee he served on outside of the medical school. So maybe I am partially responsible for his meteoric rise within the administrative ranks in the university!

Yes, Mike and I are ocean kayakers! Well not anymore but we did that for many years together. That all started when I was on vacation and tried out kayaking on a gentle lake. I thought it was great fun and a way to exercise outdoors. When I returned I found out that the UCLA aquatic center offers ocean kayaking courses, three sequential courses to be exact. So I took all of them, and not wanting to do this by myself, I convinced my wife and Mike to enroll, so we would be certified to rent kayaks from UCLA and go out into the ocean on our own. So they did that, passed the courses, and we were off! I should point out that the third kayak course, which was the “Advanced” one, the instructor took you to some remote location and required you to launch your kayak through rocky breakwater to get out into the ocean and then land through the treacherous surf. Well, on the day that Mike and my wife had to do that, their fearless instructor (Clarke, I believe) ignored the small craft warning and took them out anyway. Though I was not there, thank goodness, my wife told me that the waves were huge and the wind was particularly strong. Nevertheless, they had to launch their boats through the breaking waves to get out into the ocean. I think Mike was able to do that after a couple of tries, but when he had to return through the treacherous surf, he capsized and almost drowned trying to get to land. Nevertheless, he made it in with some help, and eventually got kayak certified. So we continued our weekend kayaking adventures for a number of years, and even purchased our own kayaks and paddled many miles out into the ocean.

So, that about sums up my longtime relationship with Mike: He is a wonderful mentor, colleague, and friend to me.