| 1 | Name: | Dr. Paul C. Zamecnik | |
| Institution: | Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School | ||
| Year Elected: | 2006 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1912 | ||
| Death Date: | October 27, 2009 | ||
Paul Zamecnik is a senior scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor Emeritus at Harvard Medical School. He has been affiliated with both institutions for over fifty years and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1936. Dr. Zamecnik's first great scientific contribution was elucidating important aspects of the biochemistry of protein synthesis. He showed that ATP is necessary for peptide bond formation, which therefore is not a reversal of proteolysis; in the cell free system, he devised the ribosome is the site of these reactions; and tRNAs translate sequences of DNA to protein. Early, he performed RNA sequencing that showed 3'-poly A in Rous sarcoma virus RNA, and a prior sequence identical to that at the 5' end, indicating circular structure. His second greatest contribution was the conception of competitive antisense nucleotides. These blocked virus replication by inhibition of translation. He demonstrated the antisense effect with hemoglobin protein synthesizing cells showing that this depends on the ability of deoxynucleotides to enter intact cells and on Watson-Crick base pairing. He has also applied the concept to medicine, targeting the tuberculosis bacterium and the defective cystic fibrosis gene. A three-time winner of the John Collins Warren Triennial Prize, (1946, 1950, 1999) as well as the Presidential Medal of Science (1991), the Lasker Award (1995) and the Institute of Virology's Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), Dr. Zamecnik was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1954, the National Academy of Sciences in 1968 and the American Philosophical Society in 2006. | |||