Shinya Inoué (井上 信也, Inoue Shin'ya, January 5, 1921[1] – September 30, 2019) was a Japanese American biophysicist and cell biologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
[3] He was a member of the faculty at Dartmouth College (1959–1966) and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1966-1982), before joining the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1982.
In the 1940s and 50s, he built the first microscope capable of imaging dynamic processes in live cells, using polarized light, and proved for the first time that the mitotic spindle is composed of aligned protein fibers.
By perturbing cells with agents that cause microtubules to depolymerize (e.g. colchicine or high pressure) or polymerize excessively (e.g. D2O), Inoué demonstrated that spindle fibers are in a state of rapid dynamic equilibrium with a pool of soluble subunits in the cytoplasm.
We also know that force generation by polymerization and depolymerization of cytoskeletal protein fibers is perhaps the most ancient of motile mechanisms within cells, whose use extends back to bacteria.