Subdivision
| • | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Howard C. Berg | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | Death Date: | December 30, 2021 | | | | | | |
Howard Berg received a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1964, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows (1963-66), and remained at Harvard as an associate professor of biology and chairman of the Board of Tutors in Biochemical Sciences until 1970. He then moved to the University of Colorado, serving as professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and department chairman until 1979 when he became a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology. In 1986 he returned to Harvard University and is currently professor of molecular and cellular biology and professor of physics, and a member of the Rowland Institute. Howard Berg was a chemist (B.S., Caltech); a medical student (two years at the Harvard Medical School); and then a graduate student in physics and Junior Fellow. As a physicist he worked with Norman Ramsey on the atomic hydrogen maser and with Ed Purcell on what is now called sedimentation field-flow fractionation. In 1968 he became interested in the motile behavior of bacteria. He has made many seminal contributions to understanding the biophysics of motility. Among other things, he and coworkers showed, via three-dimensional tracking, that E. coli executes a biased random walk and that bacterial flagella rotate: they do not wave or beat. This surprising conclusion has led Howard Berg to study the structure, genetics and physiology of the remarkable flagellar motor. Also, he has figured out how spirochetes swim, what bacterial flagella actually do when cells run and tumble and, with Ed Purcell, he developed the basic theory of the physics of chemoreception. His book Random Walks in Biology (1993), mostly about diffusion, has become a classic. His writings on life at low Reynolds numbers are great science and illustrate his intellectual reach: from pure physics to true biological understanding. His significant contributions to science reflect an approach to biological problems of a very perceptive biologist with the mind-set of a talented physicist. His inquisitiveness and productivity are models of scientific inquiry. A more recent book, E. coli in Motion (2004), reviews the field of bacterial chemotaxis. Dr. Berg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2008 he received the Biophysical Society's annual award for Outstanding Investigator in Single Molecule Biology. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Pamela J. Bjorkman | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Pamela J. Bjorkman is the Max Delbrück Professor of Biology the California Institute of Technology. She was an HHMI Investigator from 1989-2015. She received a B.A. degree in chemistry from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Harvard University. As a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow in Don Wiley's laboratory, she solved the crystal structure of a human histocompatibility molecule. She continued her postdoctoral training at Stanford University with Mark Davis, where she worked on T cell receptors. Dr. Bjorkman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has received the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Fundamental Immunology from the Cancer Research Institute (shared with Don C. Wiley and Jack L. Strominger), the James R. Klinenberg Science Award from the Arthritis Foundation, the Gairdner Foundation International Award for achievements in medical science (shared with Don C. Wiley), and the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Award (shared with Jack L. Strominger and Hans-Georg Rammensee). Dr. Bjorkman's laboratory is interested in protein-protein interactions, particularly those mediating immune recognition. The laboratory uses X-ray crystallography and biochemistry to study purified proteins, and is beginning to include confocal and electron microscopy (EM) to examine protein complexes in cells. Some of the work focuses upon homologs and mimics of class I MHC proteins. These proteins have similar three-dimensional structures but different functions, including immune functions (IgG transport by the neonatal Fc receptor, FcRn; evasion of the immune response by viral HMC mimics) and non-immune functions (regulation of iron or lipid metabolism by HFE and ZAG). Dr. Bjorkman's laboratory is also comparing the structures and functions of host and viral Fc receptors with RcRn. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Russell F. Doolittle | | | Institution: | University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 1992 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | October 11, 2019 | | | | | | |
Russell Doolittle was a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. An insightful and articulate scientist, he was an expert on the structure and evolution of proteins. Having worked out the covalent structure of fibrinogen and its role in blood clot formation, he became interested in the molecular evolution of this protein and contributed to the molecular analysis of its evolution as well as those of other proteins. Drawing on his personal computerized file of protein and DNA sequences, Dr. Doolittle discovered the remarkable similarity between the cancer-producing gene of a virus and a normal gene that encodes a growth factor from blood platelets. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Institutes of Health Career Development Award, Dr. Doolittle was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Russell Doolittle died October 11, 2019 in La Jolla, California at the age of 88. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. David S. Eisenberg | | | Institution: | UCLA-DOE Institute of Genomics and Proteomics; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2003 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
David Eisenberg received his D.Phil. in theoretical chemistry at Oxford University. In 1967 he joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is currently professor of chemistry and biochemistry, professor of biological chemistry, and director of the UCLA-DOE Center for Genomics and Proteomics. David Eisenberg's breadth and creativity have made him arguably the most influential scientist in modern structural biology. Concepts of protein structure developed by his group, such as the Hydrophobic Moment, Atomic Solvation Parameters, Sequence Profiles, and 3D-1D profiles, have been widely adopted. Their characterization of a new kind of protein interaction, Domain Swapping, has given needed insight into how amyloid proteins cause disease. New computational solutions to assignment of function from sequence, the Rosetta-Stone and Phylogenetic Profiles, helped launch the field of bioinformatics. Dr. Eisenberg also had a key role in creating the Protein Society and a new section of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Eisenberg was a Rhodes Scholar, 1961-64, and a Guggenheim Fellow, 1969-71 and 1985. He received the Stein & Moore Award from the Protein Society in 1996, the Repligen Award in Molecular Biology from the American Chemical Society in 1998, and the Amgen Award from the Protein Society in 2000. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2003. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Ragnar Granit | | | Institution: | Karolinska Institutet | | | Year Elected: | 1954 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1900 | | | Death Date: | 3/12/91 | | | | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Stephen Coplan Harrison | | | Institution: | Harvard University & Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Stephen Harrison is a world leader in understanding virus structure and in probing the relationship between structure and function of complex protein assemblies. He has devised innovative methodological enhancements of X-ray crystallography to determine the detailed molecular structures of viruses, cell-surface receptors, and DNA-protein complexes. His pioneering studies of small plant viruses at atomic dimensions revealed the basic molecular design of a large class of RNA viruses of plants, insects, and vertebrates. This work, and his subsequent studies of many other viruses, allowed Dr. Harrison to formulate principles that govern viral structure, assembly, stability, cellular attachment, and fusion. This information is fundamental to understanding viral disease and to the design of antiviral drugs and vaccines. Similarly, Dr. Harrison's X-ray crystallographic studies of the structures of DNA-protein complexes revealed important molecular mechanisms in the control of gene activity. Dr. Harrison earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1971 and is currently director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine at Children's Hospital, Boston. He won the Welch Award in Chemistry in 2015 and the Rosenstiel Award for Basic Medical Research in 2018. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. A. Baird Hastings | | | Year Elected: | 1941 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1895 | | | Death Date: | 9/24/87 | | | | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Peter H. von Hippel | | | Institution: | Institute of Molecular Biology, University of Oregon | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | | | | |
Peter von Hippel was born in Germany and became a naturalized US citizen in 1942. He obtained his BS, MS, and Ph. D. degrees at MIT, working on the physical biochemistry of protein complexes in the laboratory of Professor David F. Waugh. He then did postdoctoral work on actomyosin complexes with Dr. Manuel F. Morales at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, followed by a period as a staff scientist at NMRI while serving in the U.S. Navy He began his academic career in 1959 as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire. His work at that time involved analyzes of the structure of proteins and nucleic acids, and the effects on these macromolecules of ions and other solvent additives. He remained at Dartmouth until 1967, and then moved to the University of Oregon as a Professor of Chemistry and Member of the Institute of Molecular Biology, where he has been ever since. While at Oregon the research program in the von Hippel laboratory has progressed from studies of the interactions of simple regulatory proteins and protein models with DNA to the quantitative analysis of the structure and function of various macromolecular complexes involved in the control of DNA replication and RNA transcription. He has served as Director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Chair of the Chemistry Department at Oregon, and in 1989 was appointed an American Cancer Society Research Professor of Chemistry, which has spared him from further formal administrative activities. In other venues Dr. von Hippel has served on various study sections and advisory committees for both NIH and NSF and has participated in the activities of various professional organizations, including serving on the Board of Directors of FASEB and as President of the Biophysical Society. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous professional journals, and he and his laboratory colleagues have published more than 240 research papers. Dr. von Hippel was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1978, to fellowship of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1979, and to resident membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2004. He is the 2021 recipient of the Ignacio Tinoco Award from the Biophysical Society for his exceptional contributions to the field of biophysics. | |
| 9 | Name: | Sir Alan L. Hodgkin | | | Year Elected: | 1967 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1914 | | | Death Date: | 12/20/98 | | | | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Richard D. Keynes | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 1977 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1919 | | | Death Date: | June 12, 2010 | | | | | | |
Richard Darwin Keynes' scientific career has been devoted mainly to research on the physiology, biophysics, and molecular biology of nerve conduction. In 1951 he was invited to work in Rio de Janeiro, where he helped to show, for the first time, how the electric eel generates its additive discharge, and where he acquired a strong interest in South America. This interest would have important consequences for him. In 1968 a chance discovery in Buenos Aires of a collection of drawings made aboard the Beagle by artist Conrad Martens set him to work on the history of Charles Darwin's voyage with Captain Robert FitzRoy to South America and back around the world via the Galapagos Islands. This led Dr. Keynes first to write The Beagle Record, then to produce a new edition of Darwin's classical account of his travels entitled The Beagle Diary, and most recently to transcribe Charles Darwin's Zoology Notes & Specimen Lists from H.M.S. Beagle, which was published for the first time in 2000. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Dr. Keynes was Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1959 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1977. Dr. Keynes died on June 12, 2010, at the age of 90. | |
| 11 | Name: | Sir Aaron Klug | | | Institution: | Royal Society & University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 1996 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | November 20, 2018 | | | | | | |
Sir Aaron Klug won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of crystallographic electron microscopy. An extremely distinguished contributor to the field of virology, Dr. Klug pioneered the concept that structure provides the key to function. In the late 1950s he headed Birkbeck College's Virus Structure Research Group, making important discoveries in the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. In 1962 Sir Aaron joined the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, and over the following decade he employed methods from X-ray diffraction, microscopy and structural modelling to develop crystallographic electron microscopy in which a sequence of two-dimensional images of crystals taken from different angles are combined to produce three-dimensional images of the target. He was named director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1986, holding that post for 10 years before assuming the presidency of the Royal Society of London (1995-2000). Sir Aaron was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and is also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. Among his numerous awards are the Heineken Prize (1979), the L.G. Horwitz Prize, and the Biochemical Society's Harden Medal (1985). Born in Lithuania and educated in South Africa, Sir Aaron earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1953. He was knighted in 1988. His later work was on the application for therapeutics and biotechnology of the zinc finger family of transcription factors which he discovered in 1985 and which he developed for intervention in gene expression. Promising results have been obtained in clinical trials for a number of diseases and for improving plant crops by gene modification or insertion. Aaron Klug died November 20, 2018 at the age of 92. | |
| 12 | Name: | Dr. Roger D. Kornberg | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Roger Kornberg is Winzer Professor in Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1972 and has been a faculty member there since 1978. His work has been recognized with the Gairdner International Award (2000); the Merck Award (2002); the Sloan Prize in Cancer Research (2005); and the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Roger Kornberg's first paradigm-changing discovery was the demonstration of the flip flop of lipids between two leaflets of a membrane. In 1974 he tackled and solved the age-old mystery of chromatin structure by discovering the nucleosome. That landmark advance stemmed from his insightful application of protein chemistry and a bold leap of reasoning. In the early 1980s, Kornberg combined lateral diffusion and protein chemistry in his invention of two dimensional protein crystallization. This ingenious approach led, ultimately, to the greatest triumph of his career to date, the atomic structure determination of the giant RNA polymerase complex in the act of gene transcription, a monumental achievement that was recognized by the (unshared) Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His discovery of transcriptional mediator is yet another landmark in a career most uncommonly rich in major discoveries. Roger Kornberg is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1998) and the National Academy of Sciences (2003). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 13 | Name: | Dr. Roderick MacKinnon | | | Institution: | Rockefeller University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Roderick MacKinnon received an undergraduate degree from Brandeis University, a medical degree from Tufts University, and training in Internal Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He then began his scientific career studying the biophysics of potassium channels at Brandeis University from 1986-89. He joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School as Assistant Professor of Physiology (1989), Associate Professor of Neurobiology (1992) and Professor of Neurobiology (1995). During this period he and his laboratory characterized potassium channels - their subunit stoichiometry, pore-lining amino acids, and components of their gates - through biochemical and functional analysis. He then moved to Rockefeller University in 1996 where his laboratory has provided the first atomic descriptions of ion selective membrane channels. He is currently a professor in the laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics at Rockefeller University and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2003 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Peter Agre for his structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels. | |
| 14 | Name: | Dr. Alexander von Muralt | | | Year Elected: | 1978 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1903 | | | Death Date: | 5/28/90 | | | | |
| 15 | Name: | Dr. Gregory A. Petsko | | | Institution: | Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
The research interests of Professor Petsko have always centered upon the structural basis of biochemical properties. His approach is to bring a chemical perspective to bear on problems in biochemistry, structural biology, cell biology, and human health. His primary research tools are: protein X-ray crystallography, molecular dynamics, site-directed mutagenesis and, more recently, yeast genetics. These tools are applied to diverse biochemical problems such as: the structural origins of enzyme catalytic power; the functional role of protein flexibility; the biochemistry and genetics of the quiescent state of the eukaryotic cell, using yeast as a model organism, and the causes and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease.
Dr. Petsko graduated Summa Cum Laude from Princeton University in 1970, and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he completed his doctoral research in 1973 under the direction of Sir David C. Phillips. After a brief postdoctoral sojourn in Paris with Prof. Pierre Douzou, he was an Instructor and Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Wayne State University School of Medicine from 1973 through 1978, where he twice received a Faculty Research Award. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he served as an Associate Professor of Chemistry from 1978 through 1985 and Professor of Chemistry from 1985 through 1989. In 1990 he was appointed the Lucille P. Markey Professor in Biochemisty and Chemisty at Brandeis University. From 1994 to 2006 he served as the Director of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, at Brandeis Unviersity; and in 1996 has held the title of Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacodynamics, succeeding Prof. William P. Jencks, the first holder of this chair. He served as Chair of the Biochemistry Department at Brandeis 2008 to 2011. In 2014 he accepted the position of Arthur J. Mahon Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
Although directing a Center with 16 faculty and 200 staff occupied a considerable chunk of his time, Prof. Petsko always carried a full teaching load, and is proud of having taught freshman chemistry continuously, with only time off for sabbaticals, for almost 25 years. He also teaches critical thinking, protein crystallography, and the history of the detective story. His courses are consistently among the highest rated in the University.
He has received numerous awards, including the Sidhu Award of the American Crystallographic Association for outstanding contributions to X-ray diffraction, the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry of the American Chemical Society in 1986, and an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 1989. In 1991 he was awarded the Max Planck Prize, which he shared with Professor Roger Goody of Heidelberg for their work on the origins of some human cancers. In 1995 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2001 he was awarded the Lynen Medal (shared with Professor Janet Thornton), and was elected to the Institute of Medicine. In 2002, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he shared an award from the McKnight Endowment for Neuroscience with his Brandeis colleague, Professor Dagmar Ringe. He and Prof. Ringe also shared the Abram Sachar Medallion from the Brandeis University National Women's Committee in 2006. Prof. Petsko is the first man ever to receive this award, which he says means he at last may be getting in touch with his feminine side.
Professor Petsko's research interests are the determination of protein three-dimensional structure and the relationship of that structure to biological function. Most of his work has been, and continues to be, done in collaboration with his friend and Brandeis colleague Prof. Dagmar Ringe. The tools he uses include X-ray crystallography, proteinengineering, yeast genetics and computational biophysics. He is currently focusing on several specific problems: enzymatic catalysis of hydrogen ion transfer, the role of metal ions in bridged bimetallic enzymes and the relationship of protein flexibility to protein function.
In the Fall of 1995, his research activities expanded when he did a year's sabbatical work in yeast genetics in the laboratory of Professor Ira Herskowitz at UCSF. As a result, Prof. Petsko now has a budding yeast genetics program (pun intended), which is concerned with the biology of the quiescent state of the eukaryotic cell. In 2003, he and Prof. Ringe expanded the scope of their program yet again, this time in the direction of translational research aimed at curing human disease. They co-founded the new field of Structural Neurology, in which the tools of structure-based drug discovery are applied to find new treatments for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's Diseases, and Lewy Body Disease. To facilitate this work, they both accepted adjunct appointments as Professors of Neurology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Petsko is a co-founder of ArQule, Inc. of Woburn Massachusetts, one of the world's leading companies in combinatorial chemistry, and serves on the boards of several other biotechnology companies, including Ironwood Pharmaceuticals and Amicus Therapeutics. He is a member of both the Scientific Review Board and the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes. In 2007 he was elected President of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which, at over 12,000 members, is one of the largest scientific societies in the United States.
From 1988 through 2003 Dr. Petsko was Executive Editor for the journal Protein Engineering, which he co-founded. For the past ten years he has written a monthly opinion column in the journal Genome Biology that is widely read and reprinted.
Dr. Petsko describes himself as overweight, out of shape and frequently grouchy, opinions that are not upheld by peer review. Besides his family, teaching and his work, he says there are only a few things that he really loves: dogs; hiking through deserts, mountains and rain forests; good writing, single-malt Scotch, and high-performance cars (he usually drives, however, a Jeep - something about Brandeis salaries). Though excited about his new research directions in yeast cell biology and neurodegenerative diseases, Dr. Petsko swears that his first love remains mechanistic enzymology. He also states that his greatest accomplishment is, and always will be, the more than 100 graduate students and postdocs that he has helped to train, a list that includes five Howard Hughes Investigators, two members of the National Academy of Sciences, and the second woman ever to head a Max-Planck Institute in Germany. | |
| 16 | Name: | Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan | | | Institution: | MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology; Trinity College; Royal Society, London | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Venki Ramakrishnan was born and grew up in India. At the age of 19, he left for the United States to pursue a PhD in physics, but his interests soon turned to biology. He spent almost three decades in the USA before moving to England to work in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Most of his work has been on central problems in molecular biology, including how our DNA is packaged in cells and how genetic information is "read" to make the proteins they specify. This process is carried out by the ribosome, an enormous molecular complex of about half a million atoms. He and others determined the precise atomic structure of the ribosome which helped us to understand how it worked. The work also showed how many antibiotics work by blocking bacterial ribosomes, which could help to design better antibiotics. For this work, he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Since 2015, Ramakrishnan has been president of the Royal Society, one of the oldest scientific organizations in the world, and is a leading voice for British science.
Ramakrishnan is also the author of a popular memoir, Gene Machine, which tells about the quest for the structure of the ribosome and also describes in very frank terms what it is like to be an outsider who found himself in the middle of a race for an important problem. It talks about how science is done with its mixture of insights and persistence as well as blunders and dead ends, and how scientists behave, with their mixture of competition and collaboration, their egos, insecurities and jealousies, but also their kindness and generosity.
Venki Ramakrishnan was elected a member of the Americn Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 17 | Name: | Dr. James A. Shannon | | | Institution: | National Institutes of Health | | | Year Elected: | 1967 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 5/20/94 | | | | |
| 18 | Name: | Sir Andrew F. Huxley | | | Institution: | Trinity College, University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1917 | | | Death Date: | May 30, 2012 | | | | | | |
British physiologist and biophysicist Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley won the 1963 Nobel Prize for his work with Alan Lloyd Hodgkin on the basis of nerve action potentials, the electrical impulses that enable the activity of an organism to be coordinated by a central nervous system. The pair's findings led them to hypothesize the existence of ion channels, which was confirmed decades later. They were also among the earliest applicants of a technique of electrophysiology known as the voltage clamp. In addition, Sir Andrew contributed to sensory physiology and conducted important theoretical and experimental research on muscle contraction. Sir Andrew served as Jordell Professor and Head of the Department of Physiology at University College, London (1960-69); Royal Society Research Fellow (1969-83); President of the Royal Society (1980-85); and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1955, knighted in 1974 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1983. He was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 1975. He died on May 30, 2012, at the age of 94 in Cambridge, England. | |
| 19 | Name: | Dr. Lubert Stryer | | | Institution: | Stanford University School of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Lubert Stryer is Winzer Professor of Cell Biology Emeritus in the Department of Neurobiology of the Stanford University School of Medicine. He received his B.S. degree in 1957 from the University of Chicago and his M.D. degree in 1961 from Harvard. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and then at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England. In 1964, Dr. Stryer joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford. In 1969, he moved to Yale, and in 1976, returned to Stanford to head a new department. His research over more than four decades has dealt with the interplay of light and life. Dr. Stryer's laboratory discovered the primary stage of amplification in vision and elucidated the G-protein cascade that generates a neural signal in visual excitation. He has developed new fluorescence techniques for studying biomolecules and cells, as exemplified by the use of fluorescence resonance energy transfer as a spectroscopic ruler. Dr. Stryer is the author of four editions of Biochemistry, a textbook widely used throughout the world for more than twenty-five years and translated into more than ten languages. The interface between the academic and industrial worlds has also attracted Dr. Stryer's interest and involvement. He participated in the founding and development of innovative biotechnology companies - as President and Scientific Director of the Affymax Research Institute, Director of Affymetrix, Inc. and chairman of the Board of Senomyx, Inc. At Affymax and Affymetrix, he played a key role in devising novel optical techniques for generating high-density peptide and DNA arrays. He is a co-inventor of the DNA chip, which makes it possible to read vast amounts of genetic information in a massively parallel way. Dr. Stryer has also participated in national educational affairs as a trustee and advisor. He led the "Bio2010 Study" of National Research Council's Committee on Undergraduate Biology Education and was a Director of the McKnight Neurosciences Endowment and a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Stryer was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 1975. His other honors include the National Medal of Science (2006), the American Chemical Society Award in Biological Chemistry (1970), appointment as National Lecturer of the Biophysical Society (1987), Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (1991), the American Association for the Advancement of Science Newcomb-Cleveland Prize (1991), the Alcon Award in Vision Research (1992), an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Chicago (1992), the Distinguished Inventors Award of the Intellectual Property Owners' Association (1993) and the European Inventor of the Year Award (2006), and the Molecular Bioanalytics Award of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2002). | |
| 20 | Name: | Prof. John Z. Young | | | Year Elected: | 1973 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 7/4/97 | | | | |
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