Profile of Steven C. Hebert
- Bijal P. Trivedi, Freelance Science Writer
Humans have been obsessed with salt for thousands of years. The quest to control it has provoked wars, and salt was once considered so valuable that it was used as currency. But salt's importance to Homo sapiens is far more fundamental. Salts, not only common table salt but also those containing other metals such as potassium and calcium, are essential for life. Steven Hebert, Chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University School of Medicine (New Haven, CT), has spent his career studying mechanisms that regulate salt in the body. Hebert discovered three families of transporters that shuttle salts in and out of cells, ensuring a balance that keeps the heart, brain, and muscles working properly. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2005, Hebert's Inaugural Article in this issue of PNAS (1) demonstrates a new paradigm for treating secretory diarrhea by activating a salt-sensing protein called the calcium-sensing receptor.
Starting from Sea Salt
Hebert was born in 1946 in Rockford, IL, a mid-sized industrial city 90 miles northwest of Chicago. When Hebert was 5, his father, an electrical contractor, won a subcontract from the Morton Salt Company to develop the sea salt rights to and facilities in a small Bahamian island called Great Inagua, a “fairly primitive” place, according to Hebert, within sight of Cuba. Island life was simple, says Hebert. “We had only short-wave radio contact with Nassau, and a tanker would come in once a month with supplies for the whole population of the island,” he recalls.
One of Hebert's most vivid memories of Inagua was of the salt works where large, shallow areas of coral were flooded with seawater. The tropical sun evaporated the water leaving a thick white crust that bulldozers piled into sea salt mountains 100 to 150 feet high. “So maybe …
