The calls always seem to come in the middle of the night: "We have a lung for you." Jeffrey Wine, PhD, picks up the spent organ from a transplant recipient, and his lab kicks into high gear. It's the real thing now, after so much practice on pig lungs.

Wine and his team are looking to better understand the genetic disease cystic fibrosis, which affects 30,000 people in the United States. But his lab isn't in the medical center; Wine's home base is the Department of Psychology, an unusual setting for medical research.

Wine came to Stanford as an assistant professor of psychology 30 years ago. He studied nerve cells, called neurons, and the vast networks of connections they make. Working with crayfish as a model system, he became respected in the neuroscience field, which draws researchers from biology and medicine as well as psychology.

In 1981, he became a father, an event that changed his personal and professional life. Doctors diagnosed his newborn daughter Nina with cystic fibrosis, which affects many body systems, particularly the pancreas and lungs. Wine read everything he could about the disease and found most of it discouraging, until coming across a 1983 paper in Nature that sent him in a new direction.

Jeffrey Wine, a medical researcher based in the Department of Psychology, had a dramatic shift in career focus when his daughter Nina was born with cystic fibrosis more than 20 years ago.

"My daughter could have been born with many diseases and I wouldn't have decided to work on them. But I saw a paper that said CF is an ion channel disease. I knew about ion channels," Wine recalled.

Ion channels are tunnels in the cell membrane through which ions such as sodium and chloride pass. Many different proteins in the membrane form these channels. Mutations in the gene for one of these proteins, now known as cystic fibrosis transmembrane-conductance regulator, lead to CF.

Wine spent a sabbatical with Paul Quinton, PhD, now at UC--San Diego, who established the link between ion channels and CF. When he returned to Stanford, colleagues supported his transition to medical research.

"It helps that the Department of Psychology for over 30 years has consistently ranked number one in the country," Wine said. "There's a view among the faculty that members who are deeply committed to research can do what they want."

Wine felt lonely at first (even now he can't walk across the hallway to talk with fellow CF researchers), but over the years he has benefited from interactions with clinical and basic science colleagues. He currently works with the lung transplant program at Stanford Hospital, headed by Bruce Reitz, MD, and builds on collaborations with researchers such as Rick Moss, MD, professor of pediatrics.

"We don't have a building dedicated to CF research, but we do have an effective network of researchers pursuing the problem -- and biology teaches us that networks are efficient ways to accomplish complex tasks," Wine said.

Wine's research has steadily moved away from studying protein mutations directly. He now researches one level up, examining the groups of cells that make up glands in the lungs. "The glands are tiny, about the size of the head of a pin, but from a cellular or molecular viewpoint they're a huge challenge, with four or more cell types that work together," he said. Wine meets the challenge head-on: "There's a problem to be solved," he said. "I can't go look at another disease or another organ because it's easier."

Wine chose to focus on how CF affects the lungs because lung infections often kill these patients. It's a big jump from crayfish neurons, but he wouldn't have it any other way. "It makes all the difference to people to know that there's a very active effort to solve their disease," he said. "And what CF researchers have learned has already influenced how long patients live."

Nina Wine will be a senior in history at UC-Santa Cruz in the fall. She spent some time working in her father's lab, but won't follow in his footsteps to science or medicine.

"I believe she thinks it's dull," Wine lamented.