When John Heuser finished medical school at the height of the Vietnam War he was immediately eligible for the draft. Luckily for him, and for cell biology, he fulfilled his military service at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States Public Health Service. It was there that he brought the concept of “membrane recycling” to light.
He brought to Thomas Reese's lab at the NIH a postdoctoral project he had started with Sir Bernard Katz at University College, London—an attempt to capture a picture of neurotransmitter “quanta” being released as Katz had proposed. The only approach available to him at the time, Heuser recalls, “was to stimulate the nerve like hell and throw it into fixative.” But he soon realized, “the chances were still almost zero of catching it.” The method, however, gave him images of nerve terminals at the frog neuromuscular...
