BIO 1150 Biology and Society

Dr. Glenn H. Kageyama started off wanting to be an artist and work for Mr. Disney. His artistic skills were recognized by the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors when he and his identical twin brother David were asked to show an adult audience the art of origami (paperfolding) and kirigami (papercutting) when they were in the 3^rd grade. In Jr. High School, Miss Collins interested Glenn in Science and he began taking photographs through a microscope with a brownie box camera and won first place in the school’s science fair.  In High School, both Glenn and David won 1^st place in their High School Science Fair, Glenn in Biology, David in Mathematics. Glenn graduated with top honors as the most outstanding all-around student in the entire Los Angeles City School District. Glenn became a President Scholar at University of California, Irvine as a charter student, majoring in Marine Biology, when the school opened in 1965. As a Junior at UCI he outlined, organized and taught his first University course, BIO 40: Population: The Vital Revolution, that described an array of problems that are associated with mankind’s biggest problem: Overpopulation. He was invited to publish a description of his course in one of the first Environmental Handbooks called Ecotactics (Ballantine) containing a foreward by the well known Environmentalist, Ralph Nader. 

After graduating from UCI, he was admitted to a Graduate program in Demography (Human Population studies) at U.C. Berkeley. Because of the draft, his requested Alternative Service status so that he would not have to shoot and kill Vietnamese people. He simply told his draft board that he would rather rot in prison than shoot and kill anyone. He then taught one year of High School Biology and Photography until he was ordered by the draft board to report to the Inyo Ecology Center, just North of Bishop, CA. Once there, he received training in firefighting and mountain search and rescue and was put in charge of the Ecology Center carpenter shop. Having a degree in biology, he was asked to be reassigned to the White Mountain High Altitude Research Station, where he worked with Dr. Duane Blume in the area of high altitude physiology. He spent two years on reassignment working mainly at the High Altitude Barcroft Research laboratory at 12,500 feet, where he took care of animals (chickens, mice, marmots, and monkeys), cooked for visiting scientists, generated official weather reports, repaired powerlines, worked with concrete, wood, metal, plumbing and wiring, operated a crane and snow cat, and shoveled snow (not yellow) to make water in the winter. He liked the job so much, that after two years of alternative service (working for 25 cents an hour), he applied for and got a regular paying job with the White Mountain Research Station (University of California) where he continued to work for two more years.  While there, he met two Neuroanatomy Graduate students that were researching the effects of high elevation on rat physiology and was asked to help them out with their experiments. Realizing that, as enjoying as it was, living the life of a hermit on top of Mt. Barcroft was probably not the most productive thing that he could be doing with his life, he decided to apply for admission into a Graduate Program in Neuroanatomy at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. He chose to go to UC San Francisco, one of the top Medical Schools in the World. There he took courses with Medical Students in Anatomy, Histology, Physiology, Molecular Biology and Neuroanatomy. As a Graduate Student he assisted in the teaching of Medical Neuroanatomy. He selected a research Advisor, Dr. Margaret Wong-Riley, who had recently applied an oxidative metabolic enzyme method involving cytochrome oxidase histochemistry to the nervous system to help locaiize cellular and subcellular areas of the brain that expressed elevated levels of oxygen consumption.  This was fortuitous because Glenn wanted to find out more about the cause of abnormal neuronal physiology that resulted in seizure activity as what occurs in epilepsy. Midway through his Graduate Program at UCSF, Dr. Wong-Riley and her husband, Dr. Dan Riley were both offered positions at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Glenn and his future wife, Ann Sardinha, who he met in San Francisco, both moved to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin to complete his PhD research on Oxidative Metabolic plasticity in the Visual System. This important work demonstrated that long-term oxidative metabolic enzyme changes could be determined by experience, and that these metabolic changes could occur primarily within a particular subset of neurons. Glenn finally finished his thesis research that resulted in 6 peer-reviewed publications of original research in top research journals. He defended his thesis at the Disneyland Hotel during the Neuroscience Convention which was held across the street at the Anaheim Convention Center. This was a convenient time and place where all of his thesis committee members would be together. So even though Glenn did not fulfill his childhood dream of becoming an artist for Mr. Disney, he is probably one of the only people to say the he got his PhD at Disneyland!

He was offered a postdoc at the Developmental Research Center at UCI working with Dr. Ronald Meyer where he studied the retinotectal system of the goldfish. There he published a paper that identified glutamate as the neurotransmitter used by vertebrate retinal ganglion cells, bipolar cells and photoreceptors. His work caught the attention of Dr. Richard Robertson in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology and was offered a position as an Adjunct Professor of Neuroanatomy. He was put in charge of the Medical Neuroanatomy laboratory course where he gave all of the pre-lab lectures to Medical students. He conducted research there in the areas of Development of the Innervation of the Cerebral Cortex (with Dr. Robertson) and also the development of the auditory brainstem (with Dr. Len Kitzes).

In 1994, Dr. Kageyama was able to land a tenure track job with California State Polytechnic University in Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona University) in the Department of Biological Sciences. There he has expanded his teaching repertoire which now includes University courses in Cellular Physiology, Electron Microscopy, Histology, Histotechniques, Human Anatomy, Developmental Neuroscience, Neuroanatomy, Neuroscience, Neurohistology, Genetics, Advanced Cell Biology, General Biology, Population and Environmental Biology, Neuroscience Techniques, and Cell and Molecular Biology. He is currently working on a course on Pandemics, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.