John M Squire

Squire went to school at Fettes College, Edinburgh, and obtained a B.Sc. (physics, 1966), AKC and PhD (biophysics, 1969) from King's College, University of London, UK, the latter under the supervision of Arthur Elliott.

Squire started his career as a senior lecturer at the Biophysics Institute, Aarhus University, Denmark in 1969 followed by a brief period in the Zoology Department at Oxford University. In 1972 he moved to Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, UK, to head the Biopolymer Group. He remained at Imperial College until his official retirement in 2006, when he was head of the Biological Structure and Function Section of what was then the Biomedical Sciences Division at Imperial College. He was made Professor of Structural Biophysics in the University of London in 1995. At present he works as honorary research fellow in the Department of Physiology & Pharmacology at Bristol University, UK, and as a visiting professor at Imperial College London, UK.

The main focus of his research is on the structural basis of muscle contraction. His early contributions were the proposal of the steric blocking mechanism for the regulation of muscle contraction,[3] the discovery of face (side) polarity in the myosin filaments of vertebrate smooth muscle,[4] and the proposal of a general packing scheme of myosin molecules within the myosin filaments of all muscles.[5][6] He is an expert on the X-ray diffraction analysis of static and contracting muscle,[7] and recently has been involved in the structure analysis of isolated myosin and actin filaments by electron microscopy and single particle analysis.[8] He founded and chaired both the Collaborative Computational Project Number 13 (CCP13) for the analysis of fibre X-ray diffraction data [9] and the Imperial Muscle Initiative (IMI).[10] With Professor David Parry (biophysicist) he initiated and organized the first five Workshops on Coiled-coils, Collagen and Co-proteins held every four years in Alpbach, Austria. In 2002 a special issue of the Journal of Structural Biology based on one of these Alpbach Workshops and co-edited by Squire won the Best Professional/ Scholarly Publishing Journal: Medicine Award.[11] Squire has published well over 100 original papers, together with many reviews and in 1981 a 700-page monograph on The Structural Basis of Muscular Contraction.[12] He has also written or edited several other books on muscle and on fibrous proteins. At present he actively works on the unresolved problem of how myosin and actin molecules interact to bring about muscle contraction,[13] as well as the structure and function of the blood vessel glycocalyx.[14]