People of UW: Merrill and Bertil Hille
Distinguished emeritus professors Merrill and Bertil Hille are partners in wellness and paragons of active — even adventurous — aging
Like many retired couples of a certain age, Bertil and Merrill Hille log their engagements in an old-fashioned paper calendar. Theirs would look pretty unremarkable, actually, if not for the sprawling range of scribbled triangles that blankets much of its orderly grid like crowded peaks on a topographic map.
“Each of these triangles is a mountain hike,” explains Bertil, an emeritus professor in the UW Department of Physiology and Biophysics. “This one is Grand Park. This is Fremont Lookout. And Coldwater Lake. Alta Vista. Cowlitz Divide. Sunrise Rim. Summerland.”
This litany of alpine ascents would test the quads of the sturdiest young body. The Hilles are in their mid-80s.
“Our son and his wife were visiting,” explains Merrill, a professor emerita of zoology at the UW. “So, it’s a bit full.”
She’s speaking of this past July’s schedule, of course. But she might as well be describing the life that she and Bertil have made together: full.
While remaining intellectually active after long and distinguished careers devoted to research, writing and teaching in the life sciences, Merrill and Bertil have continued to feed a lifelong wanderlust in retirement. Amplified it, really.
They train diligently for the hiking and snowshoeing adventures across the Pacific Northwest and around the world that pack their calendar. Recent travels have found them hiking across northern Norway, circumnavigating Mont Blanc, visiting Machu Picchu and trekking in the Italian Dolomites.
These trails they have traversed serve as a neat metaphor for their lives and careers, which have been, by turn, linear and meandering, straightforward and challenging, serving obstacles to negotiate and detours to explore. And though their trails diverge at times, they always come back together.
Paths first cross
Merrill and Bertil Hille have been together for more than 60 years, long enough to finish each other’s sentences and edit each other’s stories (a biproduct, perhaps, of lifetimes working inside the peer-review system).
Both grew up with esteemed “faculty fathers.” Merrill’s was a professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell and Bertil’s was professor of mathematics at Yale.
Encouraged by his academic-minded parents, Bertil Hille cultivated an early love of science, from soaking up fascinating conversations among his parents’ scholarly friends to high school summers interning in a biology lab to daily hikes up Yale’s famed Science Hill and summer field studies at Woods Hole Oceanic Institute as an undergrad. “For me, it was an almost linear progression,” he says.
Merrill Burr’s path was more roundabout. She became fascinated by the study of embryology — how organisms develop — as a chemistry undergraduate at Cornell. And she became equally fascinated by the wild places of the Pacific Northwest when she tagged along a Boeing consulting project with her father one summer.
She preceded Bertil as a graduate fellow at New York’s Rockefeller University in the early 1960s. They met on a group camping trip organized by her roommate, the only other woman in the program. “At the time,” Merrill says,” women weren’t well accepted in science.”
The star-crossed scholars fell quickly in love and married in 1964. After completing their doctoral work (and Merrill’s postdoctoral stint at NYU deciphering the genetic code with Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa), they spent a year at Cambridge University in England. There, Merrill studied the development of chick bones with Dame Honor B. Fell of the Strangeways Research Laboratory. And Bertil worked with Sir Alan Hodgkin, the Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist.
Into the west
The newlyweds returned to the U.S. with their firstborn son in tow and a second on the way. Bertil’s mentors arranged for meetings discussing faculty posts at Harvard and Duke. Honoring Merrill’s love of the West, he also visited universities up the Pacific coast from UC San Diego to Simon Fraser. The most fateful stop was at the University of Washington.
“At the time,” Bertil says, “Seattle was known as the place you would have to stop in if you were traveling to Alaska or Japan. Academically, it did not have a lot of known appeal.”
What the UW did have was a small cohort of kindred scholars, a vigorous graduate program and advanced scientific computing facilities.
For Merrill, it had one more big selling point: location, location, location. “We came here because I wanted to be in the mountains,” she admits.
“I knew that Merrill really wanted to be in Seattle,” Bertil confirms. “I assumed that in five years we would move back home. But it turned out to be just the right place for both of us.”
They arrived in 1968. Bertil launched straight into an illustrious tenure at the UW School of Medicine, continuing the pioneering research he had begun at Rockefeller on cell signaling by ion channels. Merrill’s faculty career, on the other hand, began fitfully as a part-time postdoc in the zoology lab of Arthur Whiteley.
While frustrating, Merrill’s early underemployment allowed her to play a central role in creating one of the jewels of Seattle’s public parks.
A detour to the Burke-Gilman Trail
During their early years in Seattle, the Hilles lived in a small house beside the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway that had connected downtown Seattle to Woodinville since 1887. “The kids loved it,” Merrill recalls. “They would run to the window every time a train went by.”
What she didn’t love, however, was having to lead her young children across a neighboring railroad overpass to access Matthews Beach and Lake Washington. “There was no railing,” she recalls, “So we made the kids walk between the rails so they wouldn’t fall over the edge.”
When the Burlington Northern Railroad made its final coal run and decided to abandon the route in 1971, Merrill and a group of neighbors formed a committee to advocate for turning the railway into a paved public path for cyclists, walkers, runners and strollers along 12 scenic miles of lakeshore. They named their committee and the trail they got built after an influential judge named Thomas Burke and a financier named Daniel Gilman who were central to the rail line being built in the late 1800s.
This neighborhood plan needed city-wide attention. So, with the guidance of then-Mayor Wes Uhlman — a powerful ally — Merrill spent the summer of 1971 organizing a massive “hike-in” to build public support for the trail. On September 12, more than 2,000 Seattleites processed southward from Kenmore’s Log Boom Park and northward from Seattle’s old coal gasification plant (now Gasworks Park) to converge at Matthews Beach for a rally.
The event was a great success. But there was still much work to be done by the Burke-Gilman committee and civic leadership to negotiate a property deal with Burlington Northern, to convince residents along the route that a public trail would not invite criminal activity or lower property values, to grow support across the city and to establish alliances with environmental and recreation organizations.
On August 19, 1978, the first 12.1 miles of the Burke-Gilman Trail opened to the public.
A blockbuster discovery
During Merrill’s detour into civic advocacy, Bertil was able to focus on his pioneering scientific research on ion channels that he had begun with grad school in parallel with colleague Clay Armstrong. Ion channels allow the passage of electrically charged particles to conduct the body’s basic biological processes, from excitation and signaling to secretion and absorption.
In 1984, culminating many years of work, Bertil published the first of three editions of “Ionic Channels of Excitable Membranes.”
The insightful, accessible book earned him worldwide notoriety and a passel of awards and honors. Among them, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the Gairdner Foundation International Award, and election into the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Most gratifying, Bertil says, is seeing the impact of this work over time. “Ionic Channels” created the foundation for expansive development and discovery to come. Since the book’s debut, there have been more than 400,000 papers on ion channels to date.
Understanding ion channels has been pivotal to the development of local anesthetics, pain blockers, pharmaceuticals and medical therapies for heart disease and a multitude of other conditions.
“I had the good fortune of being there in the beginning and starting an idea that has become very important to medicine and basic science,” Bertil says.
Though he became renowned as an author more than a working scientist, he subsequently branched off into many new directions in biophysics, publishing more than 250 papers in his career.
Merrill’s path
On the other side of Bertil’s rocket-ship success, Merrill progressed more slowly up the academic chain at the UW, despite her impressive curriculum vitae.
As a part-timer in the Whiteley lab, she initially studied sea urchin embryos, and specifically how a fertilized egg makes its first proteins. This led to an interest in how cells migrate around an embryo to develop an organism’s features and functions.
It took the better part of a decade to achieve full-time faculty status and another to get her own lab. In the 1990s, Merrill began studying embryonic cell development in zebrafish, moving from invertebrates to vertebrates. “And vertebrates are considered relevant,” she says. “All the mechanisms I studied in zebrafish are the same as in us.”
Merrill was resilient and resourceful. With her lab chronically underfunded, she employed an army of undergrads to help with the work. This resulted in papers with a curious multitude of young authors, many of whom were building credentials for their own graduate science or medical degree studies. “What a great opportunity it was for them,” Bertil remarks.
During these years, Merrill also made good on her dream of climbing. She joined the Mountaineers Club while sons Erik and Trygve were in high school. And, over time, she summitted every major peak of the Pacific Northwest and many others, often alongside her equally venturesome sons.
Globe trekkers
Merrill shares her love of the outdoors with Bertil, too. Over their many decades together, they have spent countless memorable weekends day hiking, backpacking, skiing or snowshoeing in the local mountains.
They have enjoyed many adventures around the globe, too. Together or apart, they have explored Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Peru. England, France, Italy, Germany. South Africa, Kenya, Malawi and Madagascar. Japan and Mongolia. Leningrad (before the fall of the Soviet Empire).
They have floated down the Amazon, slogged the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil and trekked around the Torres del Paine and Tierra del Fuego in Argentina and Chile. 
They traversed the northern tundra of Norway in rubber boots (when Merrill was six-months pregnant with their first child). And they sailed to Antarctica (for their 50th wedding anniversary).
Only the island of Borneo — where they outlasted Merrill’s durian-induced stomach bug, the swelting jungle and legions of parasites to ascend 13,400-foot Mount Kinabalu — draws mixed reviews.
“Borneo is a place where you acquire lots of leeches,” Bertil reports. “I would avoid it.”
“I thought that was a good trip,” Merrill counters, sending them both into laughter.
Seize every day
In a biographic article he wrote on making a life in the life sciences, Bertil wrote of striving to live the ancient Greek ideal of a balanced mind and body.
They did that during their faculty years and have continued in their recent retirement. In their emeritus role, they stay intellectually active, avidly reading and writing and remaining engaged in the scholarly lives of former students and colleagues.
They also stay physically active, as a hedge against the inevitable declines that come as the years advance — and because it just feels good to move.
“The New York Times Magazine recently had a special issue on retirement,” Bertil says. “One of the tips was that you should enjoy the things you can do and not regret the things you can’t do anymore.”
“But I am regretting them,” Merrill says, with a laugh.
Yes, they have had to give up skiing and backpacking. But they walk and garden for hours every day, Merrill tending to fruits and vegetable plots while Bertil landscapes the slope behind their home of 25 years that tumbles down to a familiar trail. “He’s remodeling the Burke-Gilman below here,” Merrill jokes.
They often watch the activity along the trail with great pride. “It’s the only park that I’m happy the more people are there,” Merrill adds.
But movement is much more than a spectator sport to them. The Hilles continue embarking on active adventures every year. The tour of Mont Blanc covered 100 miles of alpine walking. The refugio-to-refugio hike across the Dolomites was a multiday ramble.
But most often they hike (or snowshoe) in the familiar mountains that first called them to this verdant corner of America. They have a cabin up in Greenwater, near Mount Rainier, that serves as an advanced base camp for endless explorations. “Before we retired, we hiked on weekends,” Bertil says. “But now, we’re free to go any time. We just keep going.”
To keep fit for these everyday adventures, the Hilles religiously attend — and provide great inspiration at — The Whole U’s Virtual Weight Training Class with Lauren Updyke every Tuesday and Thursday morning. Well, most every Tuesday and Thursday.
“If we’re missing from Lauren’s class,” Bertil says, “it’s because there’s a triangle on our calendar that day.”
