JacSue Kehoe facts for kids

JacSue Kehoe (born October 23, 1935 – died June 25, 2019) was an American scientist who studied the brain and nervous system. She was a neuroscientist. For many years, she studied the nerve cells, called neurons, of a sea slug named Aplysia californica. She learned how nerve cells respond after receiving signals.

Dr. Kehoe made an important discovery: one chemical signal, called a neurotransmitter, can have many different ways of being received by a nerve cell. These different "receivers," called receptors, can cause different reactions. She worked at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in France, where she made many other discoveries about the nervous system.

Early Life and Education

JacSue Kehoe was born on October 23, 1935, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her mother was a former student who became an English teacher. Her father worked for the Chrysler Corporation. JacSue was the youngest of three children.

During World War II, her family moved to Evansville, Indiana. This was for her father's job. After the war, they moved back to the city. There, JacSue found she loved the performing arts. She became an assistant to her high school's drama teacher. This job made her want to become a theater director. She went to Northwestern University to study theater.

After two years, she changed her main subject to experimental psychology. She was very interested in how people behave. For her final project, she did experiments about memory. After two more years, she earned her bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from Northwestern.

Kehoe continued her studies at Brown University. She focused on how the nervous system works and how it relates to psychology. This helped her understand human memory even more. She did experiments on pigeons to study how memory can be blocked. She earned her Ph.D. in 1961.

A Career in Neuroscience

After finishing her studies, Dr. Kehoe joined the psychology staff at Brown University. Later, she moved to Washington, D.C., to continue her research. She became a special researcher at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There, she kept studying how pigeons, rats, and squirrels learn to tell things apart. She became more and more interested in the physical reasons behind behavior.

In a nearby lab, another scientist named Felix Strumwasser was studying sea slugs. He used neurons from Aplysia californica to learn about circadian rhythms, which are like our body clocks. These sea slug cells were perfect for studying how neurotransmitters affect neurons. Dr. Kehoe used leftover sea slug nerve clusters, called ganglia, and equipment from Strumwasser's lab. This is how she began her important work on how nerve cells connect and communicate.

Discoveries in Paris

In 1964, Dr. Kehoe moved to Paris, France. She continued her work on Aplysia at the Institut Marey. She started experiments to find out which neurotransmitter caused certain electrical changes in nerve cells. She tried using a chemical called curare. Instead, she saw a strange change in the cells' natural electrical activity. This was unusual, so she decided to focus her research on this new discovery for several years.

After many tests, Dr. Kehoe found something amazing. She discovered that a chemical called methyl-xylocholine stopped a certain response in the cells. This was surprising because the sea slug's response she was studying was not expected to change with this chemical.

From her research, Dr. Kehoe made several key findings:

• A single neurotransmitter could have many different types of "receivers" or receptors on a neuron.
• Each receptor could change how the neurotransmitter worked in a different way.
• The way a nerve cell responded could be different from one cell to another.

Later Research and Teaching

Dr. Kehoe then became a full-time researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (C.N.R.S.) in France. In 1968, she and her husband, Philippe, went to Cambridge, England, for a break from their usual work. Dr. Kehoe worked at King's College. She was the first visiting female academic allowed to eat at the "High Table," which was usually only for men.

In the same year, her husband got a teaching job in Paris. This allowed them to have their own lab. They set up their lab at École Normale Supérieure. Over several summers, Dr. Kehoe also taught at a research program in the United States. She taught courses to students interested in neuroscience research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, working with Harvard University.

Dr. Kehoe traveled around the world, giving talks and conferences about her discoveries. She also continued her own experiments. She kept researching to find out which neurotransmitters were used in Aplysia. In the late 1900s, she started looking at glutamate receptors. In 2002, she and Philippe gave their lab to other researchers. They moved their work to a different lab in Paris. Dr. Kehoe continued her research on neurotransmitters and their effects until 2017.

Personal Life

In 1967, JacSue Kehoe married Philippe Ascher, who was also a researcher from France. Their first son, David, was born in the fall of 1968. Their second son, Ivan, was born later. Dr. Kehoe spent most of her life in Paris with her husband and their two children until her death.