| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Sharon R. Long | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Sharon Long has been responsible for elucidating many of the early reactions involved in the establishment of nitrogen-fixing nodules of leguminous plants. She has also described the genetic systems of the plants and bacteria involved in this infection process and has developed ingenious genetic and biochemical techniques for study of the nodulation of legumes. Her exceptional competence ranges from the most intricate details of plant and microbial molecular, genetic, cellular and developmental biology to large-scale concerns with science and society. Dr. Long has played an active role in the Plant Biology Section of the National Academy of Sciences, and she has served as Chair of the Biological Sciences Class of the Academy. An admirable teacher and communicator, Dr. Long is presently Professor of Biology at Stanford University, where she has taught since 1981. From 2001 to 2007 she served as the Dean of the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and in 2008 she was recognized as one of the five science advisors to the Obama campaign. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University (1979) and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1993); the American Academy of Microbiology (1993); and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1994). | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. Vernon B. Mountcastle | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1918 | | | Death Date: | January 11, 2015 | | | | | | |
Vernon B. Mountcastle was born in Shelbyville, Kentucky, educated in the public schools of Roanoke, Virginia and attended Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia, from which he graduated in 1938 with honors in chemistry. He then attended Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He received his MD in 1942 and interned in Surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, July 1942-43. He then served in the U.S. Naval Amphibious Forces for three years, with two major campaigns in the European Theater of War: Anzio, Italy and Normandy, France.
Following demobilization, he had the intent to follow a career in Neurosurgery, and in preparation went to spend a year in the research laboratories in Neurophysiology with Professor Philip Bard, then director of the Department of Physiology. He never left, and spent his entire career in research on the function of the brain, and at Johns Hopkins. Mountcastle was director of the Department of Physiology from 1964-80, and then became for nine years Director of the Philip Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology. He retired from active laboratory work and in that time established the Mind-Brain Institute, located on the arts and sciences campus of Johns Hopkins University. He spent his retirement years in writing monographs, including Perceptual Neuroscience. The Cerebral Cortex and The Sensory Hand. Neural Mechanisms in Somatice Sensation.
Dr. Mountcastle married Miss Nancy Clayton Pierpont of Salem, Virginia in 1945. They have two surviving children and six grandchildren. His hobbies were English literature and history. He had also been an avid sailor, tennis player and horseman most of his life.
Vernon Mountcastle contributed to understanding brain functions in four areas: (a) the functional organization of the somatic afferent system and cerebral cortex; (b) the dynamic mechanisms of signal processing in the somatic afferent system; © the correlation between sensory performance and central neural events in waking, non-human primates and the general laws governing those relations; and (d) the neural mechanisms of the parietal lobe system in spatial perception and directed visual attention.
He showed by electrophysiological methods the precise representation of the body form in the somatic afferent system at levels of thalamus and cortex, and demonstrated the specificity of sets of columns, modular units composed of chains of neurons powerfully connected in the vertical, trans-laminar directions. This was confirmed in anesthetized and waking cats and monkeys, in both the sensory and association areas of the cortex. It is now generally accepted as a principle of organization of the cerebral cortex, and is incorporated into present concepts of cortical distributed systems.
Mountcastle then used the method of single neuron analysis to explore the dynamic neuronal operations in the somatic afferent system, and how they relate to somatic sensory performance. He conceived that this could be done by direct, simultaneous application of the methods and concepts of Psychophysics and Neurophysiology, together with new methods for studying the higher functions of the brain in performing, non-human primates. This general method is now a widely used and productive method in CNS physiology.
The general principle evolving from this series of investigations is that the relation of the observer (monkey or human) to events in the external world varied along quantitative continua set by the transducing properties of the receptors and first-order fibers engaged by the stimuli. Thereafter, the relation of performance to central neural events along a linear continuum. This generality has been confirmed for a number of somesthetic submodalities.
An extensive series of experiments was carried out on the sense of vibration, which provides a signature of the temporal order of the impulses discharges evoked by the vibrating stimuli. Studies were made from the level of the first-order input in monkeys to that of sensory performance measured in psychophysical experiments in monkeys and humans: the functional properties of neural elements are identical in the two primates. This included direct studies of cortical activity during detections and discriminations. A major finding was that the neural code in the postcentral somatic sensory cortex upon which discrimination depends is the temporal order of impulse discharge. This was later pursued to define the code transformations that intervene between the input portal in the somatic sensory cortex of the postcentral gyrus to the output from the motor cortex leading to overt discrimination.
A major change was a shift of emphasis from study of sensory systems to that of higher functions, particularly of the parietal lobe system. This required new methods and new concepts to deal with the conditionality of higher functions. It was discovered that sets of parietal lobe neurons were embedded in distributed systems that control the projection of the arm towards a target, the shaping of a hand to grasp the target, and sets differentially active during directed visual attention. It was then found that the visual world is represented in the parietal lobe system in a manner completely different from that of the striate system. It provides a halo surrounding the head of extreme sensitivity to visual events in the immediate behavioral surround, of the flow of the visual world during movements of the eyes, head and body. These neural mechanisms are inferred to serve the illusions of vection. This work opened for direct electrophysiological study the higher functions of the brain, a research program now actively pursued in many laboratories. It has led to a deeper understanding of the disorders of attentions and of consciousness that follows parietal lobe lesions in man.
Vernon Mountcastle died January 11, 2015, at age 96, at his home in Baltimore, Maryland.
He had been awarded the American Philosophical Society's Karl Spencer Lashley Award in 1974 and was elected to its membership in 1976. | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. Walle J.H. Nauta | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1971 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1916 | | | Death Date: | 3/24/94 | | | | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Sanford Louis Palay | | | Institution: | Harvard University & Boston College | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1918 | | | Death Date: | August 5, 2002 | | | | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. John B. Robbins | | | Institution: | National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | November 27, 2019 | | | | | | |
John B. Robbins received an M.D. from New York University in 1959. He was a guest scientist at the Weizmann Institute for Science, Israel (1965-66), then became assistant to associate professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1967-70). In 1970 he became the clinical director, then chief, of the Developmental Immunology Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. From 1974-83 he was director of the Bacterial Products Division, Bureau of Biologics, at the Federal Drug Administration. He returned to the National Institutes of Health in 1983 to serve as Chief of the Laboratory of Developmental and Molecular Immunity in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, where he is currently Senior Investigator. John Robbins made the most important advance in the past half century in preventing diseases caused by encapsulated bacteria such as the influenza bacillus and pneumococcus, among others. By chemically coupling to protein the capsular polysaccharides of pathogenic bacteria, which are poor antigens in infancy, he developed conjugate vaccines, one of which has all but eliminated infections caused by Haemophilus influenzae type b, the commonest cause of bacterial meningitis in childhood. Similar conjugate vaccines for preventing pneumoccocal infections in infancy and typhoid fever show promise of comparable efficacy. Robbins has also made fundamental contributions to the understanding of so-called "natural immunity." Dr. Robbins is the recipient of the E. Mead Johnson Award of the American Academy of Pediatrics (1975), the Albert Lasker Clinical Research Award (1996), and the Albert Sabin Gold Medal (2001). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. John Robbins died November 27, 2019 in New York, New York at the age of 86. | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Francis O. Schmitt | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1953 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1903 | | | Death Date: | 10/3/95 | | | | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. Thomas Eugene Shenk | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Thomas Shenk is the James A. Elkins, Jr, Professor of Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He is a virologist, who has investigated gene functions and pathogenesis of adenovirus, a DNA tumor virus, and human cytomegalovirus, a member of the herpes family of viruses. His laboratory’s current areas of focus include the dissection of cytomegalovirus gene functions, persistence and latency.
Dr. Shenk served as chair of Princeton’s Department of Molecular Biology for two terms. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Virology and as Chair of the Council for Research and Clinical Investigation of the American Cancer Society. He is a past president of the American Society for Virology and the American Society for Microbiology. He served on the board of directors of Merck and Company for 11 years, and he currently serves as a board member of Kadmon Pharmaceuticals, Forge Life Science, the Fox Chase Cancer Center and the Hepatitis B Foundation.
Dr. Shenk is the recipient of the Eli Lilly Award from the American Society for Microbiology, an American Cancer Society Professorship and an Investigatorship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and he is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Institute of Medicine. He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2015. | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Louis Sokoloff | | | Institution: | National Institutes of Health | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1921 | | | Death Date: | July 30, 2015 | | | | | | |
Born in Philadelphia in 1921, the second of two sons of Eastern European immigrants, Louis Sokoloff early discovered the power of books in satisfying his curiosity and thirst for knowledge. His undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania was highlighted by exposure to the illustrious physiologist L. V. Heilbrunn. Contacts with this professor in and out of the classroom stimulated his love of science, which never faltered. It was Heilbrunn who first noted Sokoloff's potential and who steered him toward a professional career--he recommeneded medical studies. An interest in cell excitation on the one hand, stemming back to his undergraduate days, and assignments to psychiatric services in his medical internship as well as during his subsequent Army service on the other, intensified Sokoloff's interest in brain function. It was during this period that he met his future wife Betty. Following his return to civilian life in 1949, he sought to renew his interest in research, and was drawn to the laboratory of the then-35 year old Seymour Kety, who had just landed an NIH grant at Penn and was looking for a young associate. Soon thereafter, Dr. Sokoloff became immersed in learning the theoretical and practical aspects of the nitrous oxide technique for measuring the rate of cerebral blood flow (CBF) in humans. The method is based on Kety's mathematical model that derived the flow rate from measurement of brain uptake and release of diffusible substance. Low concentrations of the inert gas nitrous oxide was used for this purpose. During this period, Sokoloff made his first measurement of cerebral metabolism in hyperthyroidism, finding it not to be elevated even when the body's basal metabolic rate was nearly double. This led him to the hypothesis that thyroid hormones stimulate protein synthesis and to his interest in the thyroid hormone functions, a subject to which he subsequently made significant contributions. Many studies were performed on human subjects by Kety, Sokoloff, and co-workers, examining the rates of CBF and metabolism in mental activity, sleep, anesthesia, and under the influence of various pharmacological agents. In 1951, Kety moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and offered Sokoloff the opportunity to join him. He accepted, and eventually was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Cerebral Metabolism at the NIH, a title he retained for 35 years. At the NIH, Sokoloff collaborated with Kety, William Landau, Lewis Rowland and Walter Freygang, in developing a quantitative autoradiographic technique for measuring regional CBF in animals which he used to demonstrate a clear linkage between functional activity and regional blood flow in visual pathways of the brain. The autoradiographs from this study represented the first ever published demonstration of functional brain imaging. Sokoloff then used the quantitative autoradiographic technique to develop a method for the measurement of regional brain metabolism of glucose, the almost exclusive substrate for energy metabolism in the brain. There is little need to recount in detail Sokoloff's pioneering studies on regional cerebral glucose utilization for which he introduced the use of -2deoxy-D-[14C]glucose. The elegance of the deoxyglucose method itself and the great care taken in its quantification and in defining its limits are all reflections of Sokoloff's research style. Adaptation of the method to human studies was subsequently accomplished by means of single photon and positron emission tomography, in which [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose replaced the 14C=labeled compound, and was the result of a collaborative effort between Sokoloff, Martin Reivich, David Kuhl, Alfred Wolf, and Michael Phelps.
The many tributes already paid Dr. Sokoloff attest to his accomplishments. Among his honors were membership in numerous societies and professional organizations including the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005. He served as president of the American Society for Neurochemistry, the International Society for Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, and the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease and on various editorial and advisory boards. He was the recipient of the Distinquished Service Award of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1976); the F.O. Schmitt Medal in Neuroscience (1980); the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award (1981); the Karl Spencer Lashley Award of the American Philosophical Society (1987); the National Academy of Sciences Award in the Neurosciences (1988); the Georg Charles de Hevesy Nuclear Medicine Pioneer Award of the Society of Nuclear Medicine (1988); the Award of the Mihara Cerebrovascular Disorder Research Promotion Fund (1988); the Vicennial Medal, Georgetown University (1994); Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (1996); and the Ralph Gerard Award of the Society of Neuroscience (1996). Dr. Sokoloff died July 30, 2015, at the age of 93, in Washington, DC. | |
| 29 | Name: | Dr. Roger W. Sperry | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | 4/17/94 | | | | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Gunther S. Stent | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | Death Date: | June 12, 2008 | | | | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. Jack L. Strominger | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | | | | |
Jack Strominger, Higgins Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard University, has worked on the mode of action of penicillin and uncovered the molecular basis of its activity. In recent years, he has conducted research on the structure and function of human histocompatibility antigens: proteins on the surface of all cells that characterize the uniqueness of each individual and play an essential role in presenting peptides to the immune system. His early work involved isolating and characterizing these so called MH proteins. Dr. Strominger has also, along with Don Wiley, crystallized the molecule and determined its three dimensional structure to other cells in the immune system - a striking advance in our understanding of the molecular basis of immunology. His laboratory is currently focused on three main projects: the role of MHC proteins and of products of other disease susceptibility genes in human autoimmunity, including multiple sclerosis, diabetes, pemphigus vulgaris and ankylosing spondylitis; activating and inhibitory immunological synapses in human natural killer cells: how they are formed and how they function, particularly in relation to lipid rafts; and uterine decidual lymphocytes and their roles in the immunobiology of pregnancy. Having taught at Harvard University since 1968, Dr. Strominger has also served on the faculties of the Washington University School of Medicine (1948-51, 1955-64) and the University of Wisconsin Medical School (1964-68) and from 1951-54 worked as a senior assistant surgeon for the U.S. Public Health Service at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. His many awards include the National Academy of Sciences Award in Microbiology (1968), the Pasteur Medal (1990) the American Society for Microbiology's Hoechst-Roussel Award (1990), the Lasker Award (1995), the Paul Ehrlich Prize (1996), and the Japan Prize (1999. Dr. Strominger was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1968 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1970. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Richard F. Thompson | | | Institution: | University of Southern California | | | Year Elected: | 1999 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1930 | | | Death Date: | September 16, 2014 | | | | | | |
Richard Thompson received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He was a professor at the University of Oregon School of Medicine from 1959-67 and a professor at the University of California, Irvine from 1967-73 and 1975-80. He was then professor, Karl Lashley's Chair, at Harvard University from 1973-75 and the Bing Professor of Human Biology and Psychology at Stanford University from 1980-87. He then became the Keck Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences and Director of the Neurosciences Program at the University of Southern California. He was a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association and the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He received the 2010 Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement from the American Psychological Foundation. He was the author of Foundations of Physiological Psychology (1967); (with others) Psychology (1971); and Introduction to Physiological Psychology (1975). Dr. Thompson served on the council of the Society for Neuroscience and as president of the American Psychological Society. He devoted his life to the study of brain substrates of behavior. His text, Foundations of Physiological Psychology, was a landmark in the development of modern behavioral neuroscience, as was his later founding and editing of the APA journal, Behavioral Neuroscience. Inspired by Karl Lashley's "search for the engram," his research was focused on neural mechanisms of learning and memory, initially in the now classic work with W.A. Spencer on habituation. Dr. Thompson and his students utilized basic associative learning in mammals, characterizing processes of memory formation in two brain structures: hippocampus and cerebellum. They appear to have localized one form of memory trace to the cerebellum, thus coming full circle to Lashley's initial quest. Dr. Thompson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999 and was awarded the Society's Karl Spencer Lashley Award in 2007 "In recognition of his distinguished contributions to understanding the brain substrates of learning and memory. Specifically, through his meticulous and diligent application of the eyeblink classical conditioning paradigm, Thompson discovered the essential role of the deep cerebellar nuclei, as an essential component of classically conditioned procedural memory formation, and that plasticity within the synapses of these nuclei represent the long-elusive memory trace that Lashley had sought." Richard Thompson died September 16, 2014, at age 84. | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. Inder M. Verma | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Inder Verma has made many sustained contributions to biological sciences in the last 30 years. In 1972, while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Verma carried out the first complementary DNA (cDNA) synthesis to eukaryotic messenger RNA using reverse transcriptase, which is one of the basic tenets of modern biotechnology. Starting in 1974 at The Salk Institute, Dr. Verma characterized the biochemical properties of the seminal enzyme, reverse transcriptase - a set of studies that are now in biology textbooks. In early 1980, Dr. Verma's laboratory began to study the molecular architecture of RNA tumor viruses. His laboratory determined the complete nucleotide sequence of the first transforming virus and identified the transforming gene. More importantly the sequence revealed the molecular mechanism of how normal cellular sequences (proto-oncogenes) can be acquired by seemingly innocuous viruses to become cancer genes (oncogenes). Dr. Verma's laboratory also discovered a new transforming gene, Fos, which turned out to be a transcriptional factor, essential for the induction of a wide variety of genes in response to a plethora of external signals. These studies established the principle that acquisition of cellular genes capable of transcription of other genes is an important mechanistic event to subvert the normal cellular transcriptional machinery. These studies were extended to novel transcription factors like NF-KB and their role in the neoplastic transformation of the cell. More recently Dr. Verma's laboratory has cleverly exploited the use of mouse genetics to pinpoint the role of many of these oncogenes/transcription factors in normal cellular growth, differentiation, and development. Dr. Verma's laboratory in 1983 developed the first viral delivery system to transfer therapeutic genes to cells and animals. Dr. Verma's laboratory laid the basis for the use of mouse RNA tumor viruses as delivery vehicle, which has become the mainstay of the field of gene therapy. Dr. Verma's laboratory over the last 15 years has continuously refined the use of viral vectors for successful gene delivery. His laboratory has shown that mice and dogs suffering from hemophilia (a clotting disorder) due to deficiency of factor IX gene product, can be cured by a single injection of viral vectors making factor IX gene product. These results have formed the basis of current clinical trials with hemophiliacs. In his quest for an efficient, safe, and versatile delivery system, Dr. Verma's laboratory has tamed the dreaded AIDS virus (HIV) to become an efficient and safe delivery vehicle. His pioneering work in this area has lead to the generation of a highly efficient and versatile gene delivery system to cure a wide variety of genetic diseases. Dr. Verma, though a basic scientist, has been an ardent supporter of translational research, "bench to bedside". He was a founder of one of the first gene therapy related biotech companies in the world, Cell Genesys. Presently he serves on the board of this company and chairs their scientific advisory board. Cell Genesys is presently embarking upon seven cancer related clinical trials, and is gearing up to treat hemophiliacs. Dr. Verma has been on the editorial boards of a number of international scientific journals, including serving as editor-in-chief of Molecular Therapy, a journal specializing in gene therapy. He is also handling editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). Exploiting the knowledge in the area of signal transduction, Dr. Verma founded another biotech company, Signal Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (now CellGene) to try to identify small molecules capable of interfering with diseases like cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammation, etc. Dr. Verma firmly believes that a rational drug design based on the precise knowledge developed by working on model systems is the way of future molecular medicine. Because of his pioneering work in the biotechnology arena, Dr. Verma is on the scientific advisory boards of several biotech companies. More recently Dr. Verma has been helping a number of Indian information technology (IT) companies to enter the field of biotechnology to begin to mine enormous biological information. Dr. Verma has had a long-standing association with the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and has helped it to formulate its cherished goal of starting a biotechnology revolution in India. Dr. Verma's scientific contributions have been widely recognized by a number of honors, which include the American Cancer Society Professorship (lifetime), an Outstanding Investigator Award from the NIH, membership in the Third World Academy of Science, the National Academy of Science, India, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Institute of Medicine, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and an associate member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Dr. Verma has also received numerous awards, including the 2008 Vilcek Foundation Prize, and invited lectureships at various national and international organizations. Dr. Verma combines the best of basic science with its applications to medicine. He has, by example and as a spokesman, championed the cause of biotechnology for the benefit of the common man. Dr. Verma strongly believes that the purpose of science in the long run is to improve the quality of life of humankind. | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Peter K. Vogt | | | Institution: | The Scripps Research Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1991 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | | | | |
Peter Vogt's work on the biology and genetics of retroviruses has opened major new horizons in understanding cancer. He and his colleagues were the first to identify a specific cancer-causing gene (oncogene) of a retrovirus and to establish (with Stehelin, Varmus and Bishop) the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. These discoveries form the conceptual basis of contemporary research on the genesis of cancer. More recently, Dr. Vogt has also discovered new oncogenes that play key roles in regulating the growth of cells. A professor at the Scripps Research Institute since 1993, Dr. Vogt has also served as assistant and associate professor of pathology at the University of Colorado (1962-67); as professor of microbiology at the University of Washington (1967-71); and as Hastings (Distinguished) Professor of Microbiology at the University of Southern California (1971-93). A member of the National Academy of Sciences (1980), the Institute of Medicine (2003) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2004), he is also the recipient of awards such as the Max Planck Society's Irene-Vogeler Prize (1976) and the ICN International Prize in Virology (1989). An accomplished painter, Dr. Vogt's artistic work can be viewed at www. pkvogt.com. | |
| 35 | Name: | Dr. Paul A. Weiss | | | Institution: | Rockefeller University | | | Year Elected: | 1953 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1898 | | | Death Date: | 9/8/89 | | | | |
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