Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
Subdivision
| • | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | [X] |
| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Paul Mead Doty | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1970 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1920 | | | Death Date: | December 5, 2011 | | | | | | |
Paul M. Doty was professor of public policy and Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry Emeritus at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was also the founder and Director Emeritus of the Center for Science and International Affairs and an emeritus member of the BCSIA Board of Directors. During his 42 years on the Harvard University faculty, Dr. Doty embraced two careers: one in biochemistry, where he founded the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the other in science policy and international security studies, where he founded the Center for Science and International Affairs in 1974. From 1960-64 he was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee and from 1961-67 he also served as a consultant to the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The recipient of awards including the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry, Dr. Doty was the author of numerous articles in scientific journals and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1970.
Paul Doty died on December 5, 2011, at age 91 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. John T. Edsall | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1955 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1902 | | | Death Date: | June 12, 2002 | | | | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. Erin K. O'Shea | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1965 | | | | | | |
Erin O’Shea is president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a top biomedical philanthropy. HHMI is known for driving science forward by investing in scientists, educators and students with the potential to make transformative change. O’Shea is the first woman to lead HHMI.
A leader in the scientific fields of gene regulation, signal transduction, and systems biology, O’Shea maintains a research lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. She previously served as the Institute’s Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer and has been an HHMI investigator since 2000.
Prior to joining HHMI, O’Shea was the director of Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology and its Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemistry and Chemical Biology. O’Shea has also served on the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco. She earned a PhD in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Smith College.
O’Shea is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology. In 2017, Washingtonian magazine named her "one of Washington’s 100 most powerful women." | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Donald A. Glaser | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | February 28, 2013 | | | | | | |
Donald Glaser had been an institution at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Professor of Physics and Professor of Neurobiology in the Graduate School. He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber detector of subatomic particles. This device played a critical role in the flowering of experimental particle physics in the sixties and seventies. In later years Dr. Glaser turned his research interests to the psychophysics of visual perception, to which he has made several significant contributions. His research goal was to construct computational models of the human visual system that explain its performance in terms of its physiology and anatomy. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, Dr. Glaser was a man with broad scientific and cultural interests, not least among them being, as a former member of the Cleveland Orchestra's string section, his professional-level musicianship.
Donald Glaser died February 28, 2013, at the age of 86 at his home in Berkeley, California. | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein | | | Institution: | University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center | | | Year Elected: | 1987 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Joseph Goldstein is currently Chairman of the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and Julie and Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Research and Paul J. Thomas Chair in Medicine. In 1985, he was named Regental Professor of the University of Texas. Together with his colleague Dr. Michael S. Brown, Dr. Goldstein has received a number of awards for their discovery of receptors that control cholesterol metabolism, including the Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research (1985), Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1985), National Medal of Science (1988) and Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (2003). Dr. Goldstein is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and the Institute of Medicine. He is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London) and has received Doctor of Science honorary degrees from numerous institutions, including University of Chicago, University of Paris and The Rockefeller University. Dr. Goldstein is a past president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (1985-86) and was a member of the Governing Council of the U.S. National Academy of Science (1991-94). He was also a Non-Resident Fellow of the Salk Institute (1983-1994) and served as Chairman of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1995-2002). He has also served as a member of the editorial boards of Cell, Annual Review of Genetics, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Arteriosclerosis, Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Dr. Goldstein is currently Chairman of the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards Jury and is a member of the Boards of Trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and The Rockefeller University. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Welsh Foundations, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Van Andel Institute, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He also currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of several biotechnology companies (Genentech, Armgo, Five Prime) and is a member of the Board of Directors of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Carol W. Greider | | | Institution: | University of California Santa Cruz | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | | | |
Carol Greider, Ph.D. received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, working together with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, she discovered telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomeres, or chromosome ends. In 1988, Dr. Greider was recruited to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an independent Cold Spring Harbor Fellow, where she cloned and characterized the RNA component of telomerase. In 1990, Dr. Greider was appointed as an assistant investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, followed later by appointment to Investigator in 1994. She expanded the focus of her telomere research to include the role of short telomeres in cellular senescence, cell death and in cancer. In 1997, Dr. Greider moved her laboratory to the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 2003, she was appointed as the Daniel Nathans Professor and Director of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. Dr. Greider’s group continued to study the biochemistry of telomerase and determined the secondary structure of the human telomerase RNA. In addition, she characterized the loss of telomere function in mice, which allowed an understanding of human diseases that make up the short telomere syndromes. Dr. Greider shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 with Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres and telomerase. In 2014, Dr. Greider was appointed as a Blooomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Greider directs a group of scientists studying both the role of short telomeres in age-related disease and cancer as well as the regulatory mechanism that maintain telomere length. In 2020 she became Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental (MCD) Biology at University of California Santa Cruz. | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. Leroy Hood | | | Institution: | Providence St. Joseph Health; Institute for Systems Biology | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Leroy E. Hood is the President and Director of the Institute for Systems Biology, a not-for-profit institution he recently established. He has helped start more than half a dozen companies, including Amgen, the largest biotech company, and Applied Biosystems, the leading maker of genetic analysis equipment. He received an M.D. at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1964 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry at California Institute of Technology in 1968. A member of the faculty of the California Institute of Technology for twenty-two years, he was also director of the Cancer Center, 1981-90, and director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Molecular Biotechnolgy, 1989-92. From 1992-2000 he was the Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington, as well as William Gates III Professor and Chairman of the Department of Molecular Biotechnology, professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Immunology, and an adjunct professor in the Departments of Medicine and Computer Science. Leroy Hood played a central role in deciphering the mechanisms of immunological diversity by being among the first to clone and characterize genes encoding antibodies, genes of the major histocompatibility complex, and T-cell receptors. His laboratory also developed four instruments widely used to synthesize and sequence genes and proteins. Dr. Hood also played a pioneering role in the Human Genome Project and co-edited The Code of Codes, covering the scientific, legal, and ethical aspects of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Hood initiated major programs for bringing hands-on, inquiry-based science to all levels of teachers in Seattle. Dr. Hood is the recipient of many awards, including the Louis Pasteur Award, Dickson Prize, Lasker Award, Rabbi Shai Shacknai Memorial Prize of Hebrew University, the American College of Physicians Award, the NAE's Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, and the National Medal of Science (2012). In January 2017 he was awarded the National Academy of Sciences' Award for Chemistry in Service to Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2000. | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Susan Band Horwitz | | | Institution: | Albert Einstein College of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Dr. Susan Band Horwitz was born in Boston where she grew up and attended public high school. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, she attended Brandeis University where she received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Pharmacology at Tufts University Medical School, Emory University Medical School and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She joined the faculty at Albert Einstein in 1970 and is presently the Falkenstein Professor of Cancer Research, Co-Chair of the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and the Associate Director for Therapeutics at the Albert Einstein Cancer Center.
Dr. Horwitz has had a continuing interest in natural products as a source of new drugs for the treatment of cancer. Her contributions span several decades of research and encompass agents which have served as prototypes for some of our most important drugs that are currently in clinical use. She made major contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms of action of camptothecin, the epipodophyllotoxins and bleomycin. However, Dr. Horwitz’ most seminal research contribution has been in the development of Taxol, a drug isolated from the yew plant, Taxus brevifolia. Although no one was interested in Taxol when she began her studies, today it is an important antitumor drug approved by the FDA for the treatment of ovarian, breast and lung carcinomas. The drug has been given to over a million patients. Dr. Horwitz' research played an important role in encouraging the development of Taxol by the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. Horwitz is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received numerous honors and awards including the Cain Memorial Award of the AACR, the ASPET Award for Experimental Therapeutics, the C. Chester Stock Award from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize from Harvard Medical School, The American Cancer Society’s Medal of Honor -Clinical Research Award, The Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science & Technology, the Barnard Medal of Distinction, and the 2014 John Scott Science Award. In 2011, Dr. Horwitz received the AACR Lifetime Achievement Award in Cancer Research and The New York Academy Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Biomedical Science. She served as president (2002-2003) of the American Association of Cancer Research. Susan Horwitz was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 29 | Name: | Dr. Tony Hunter | | | Institution: | The Salk Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Tony Hunter was born in Ashford, Kent, England. He attended Caius College at the University of Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1965. Subsequently, he did his graduate studies in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Asher Korner, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969 for work on mammalian protein synthesis. In 1968 he was appointed as a Research Fellow of Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, and then worked for three years in the Department of Biochemistry doing independent research on the initiation of protein synthesis in eukaryotes. In 1971 he joined the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, as a Research Associate working under Walter Eckhart on polyoma virus DNA synthesis. He spent 1973-75 back at the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge where he discovered how tobacco mosaic virus expresses its coat protein, before joining the Salk Institute as an assistant professor in 1975. At that time he set out to identify tumor virus transforming gene products, starting with the tumor (T) antigens of polyoma virus and then turning his attention to Rous sarcoma virus (RSV). In the course of studying the polyoma virus middle T antigen and the RSV v-src gene product, he discovered that these proteins both exhibit a previously unknown protein kinase activity that phosphorylates tyrosine. He has spent most of the last thirty years studying tyrosine kinases and their role in cell growth, oncogenesis and the cell cycle. A major current research interest is to elucidate mechanisms of transmembrane signaling by tyrosine kinases and phosphatases. His group also studies the cyclin-dependent protein kinases and other protein kinases that regulate progression through the cell cycle, and how protein ubiquitylation and degradation is used as a means of regulating signaling pathways and the cell cycle. He is currently a professor in the Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, the director of the Salk Institute Cancer Center, and an adjunct professor in the Division of Biology at the University of California, San Diego. Currently he is on the editorial boards of several journals, including Cell, Molecular Cell, the EMBO Journal and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He serves on a number of scientific review and advisory committees. He has been an organizer for many scientific meetings. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1987, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1992, an Associate Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1992, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1998 and a member of the Institute of Medicine in 2004. He was appointed as an American Cancer Society Research Professor in 1992. He has received a number of awards for his work in the area of growth control, oncogenesis and protein phosphorylation, including the 1994 General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Mott Prize, a 1994 Gairdner Foundation International Award, the Biochemical Society 1994 Hopkins Memorial Lectureship and Medal, the 2001 Keio Medical Science Prize, the 2003 Sergio Lombroso Award in Cancer Research, the 2003 City of Medicine Award, the 2004 American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, the 2004 Kirk A. Landon-AACR Prize for Basic Cancer Research, the Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research, 2004, the 2004 Louia Gross Horwitz Prize, the 2005 Wolf Prize in Medicine, the 2006 Pasarow Award in Cancer Research, in 2017 the inaugural Sjoeberg Prize cancer research; the 2018 Pezcoller-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research, and the 2018 Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science. His hobbies include white water rafting and desert camping. | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Louis J. Ignarro | | | Institution: | University of Callifornia, Los Angeles | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Louis J. Ignarro is a Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the UCLA School of Medicine and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his groundbreaking discovery of the importance of nitric oxide in cardiovascular health. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Ignarro has also received numerous other special awards for his research, including the Basic Research Prize of the American Heart Association, the CIBA award for Hypertension Research, and the Roussel Uclaf Prize for Cell Communication and Signaling. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has published over 500 scholarly articles in his career. For nearly 30 years Dr. Ignarro's research has focused on the role of nitric oxide in the cardiovascular system. Among the most significant contributions from Dr. Ignarro's wealth of research is the discovery that nitric oxide is produced in the blood vessels and controls the flow of blood by signaling the vessels to expand and contract. A shortage of nitric oxide production, caused by poor diet and lack of physical activity, leads to the onset and increasing severity of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack, stroke, and high cholesterol. In addition, Dr. Ignarro's experiments in 1990 led to the discovery that nitric oxide is the neurotransmitter responsible for penile erection. The discovery made it possible to develop and market Viagra, the first oral medication for the effective treatment of erectile dysfunction. As a result of his role in this blockbuster drug, Dr. Ignarro is sometimes known as "the father of Viagra". In addition to continuing to lead an active team of researchers in his lab at UCLA, Dr. Ignarro now focuses on communicating the benefits of enhanced nitric oxide production to the general public. His goal is to wipe out heart disease using the scientific knowledge he has created. His work proves that almost all cardiovascular disease is preventable. Louis J. Ignarro was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941, the son of uneducated Italian immigrants. He received a B.Sc. in chemistry and pharmacy from Columbia University in 1962, a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Minnesota in 1966, and postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology at the National Institutes of Health in 1966-68. | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. William P. Jencks | | | Institution: | Brandeis University | | | Year Elected: | 1995 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1927 | | | Death Date: | January 3, 2007 | | | | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Mary Ellen Jones | | | Institution: | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | 8/23/96 | | | | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. Thomas J. Kelly | | | Institution: | Sloan-Kettering Institute; Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 1998 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Thomas Kelly has been a world leader in unraveling how complex DNA viruses are replicated, thereby providing important understanding into control of the growth of animal cells. As a fellow in Hamilton Smith's laboratory, he identified the first recognition sequence of a restriction enzyme: a major and critical milestone in recombinant DNA technology. Dr. Kelly was the first to devise cell-free systems that faithfully replicated eukaryotic DNA and successfully copied the complete adenovirus genome in vitro. This led to an important technique: DNA recognition-site affinity chromatography which is widely used for the isolation of proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences. In a major advance he developed a system (and identified many of the catalytic components) for the replication of the oncogenic simian virus SV 40. Analysis of this system has revealed how DNA replication is initiated, including a tightly regulated phosphorylation which controls DNA unwinding. Dr. Kelly is deeply respected for his scientific originality and his incisive contributions to DNA replication. He currently directs the Sloan-Kettering Institute and previously built a world-class department of molecular biology and genetics during his tenure at Johns Hopkins University. He has fostered the careers of numerous young scientists and been an important spokesperson for science. | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Eugene Patrick Kennedy | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1993 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1919 | | | Death Date: | September 22, 2011 | | | | | | |
Eugene Patrick Kennedy was born in Chicago in 1919. He enrolled at De Paul University in 1937 as a chemistry major and then went to the University of Chicago in 1941 for graduate training in organic chemistry. To pay his tuition, Dr. Kennedy also got a job in the chemical research department of Armour and Company, one of the large meat packers in Chicago. As part of the war effort, his job at Armour was to assist in the large scale fractionation of bovine blood to obtain pure bovine serum albumin. It was believed that the bovine serum albumin might be useful for treating shock in soldiers on the battlefield. However, by the end of 1942, hope had faded that bovine serum albumin would be an effective treatment, and the Red Cross started to collect blood from volunteers instead. Armour opened a new facility in Fort Worth, Texas for the fractionation of human blood from donors, and Kennedy was sent to Fort Worth to assist in this effort. He remained in Texas until 1945, when the war was nearing its end and large amounts of human plasma proteins had been stockpiled. Returning to the University of Chicago, Dr. Kennedy immediately transferred from the Department of Chemistry to the Department of Biochemistry. His experience on the plasma project had led to a new appreciation of biochemistry. After finishing graduate school, Dr. Kennedy went to the University of California, Berkeley, to work with Horace A. Barker, who had just discovered that soluble extracts of Clostridium kluyveri cells could produce short-chain fatty acids from ethyl alcohol. Although the initial discovery had already been made, there was much to be learned about these extracts, and Dr. Kennedy aided in this effort. In 1950, he joined Fritz Lipmann at Harvard Medical School. He then returned to the University of Chicago in 1951, after being given a joint appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and the newly organized Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research. In 1959, he was invited to become a Hamilton Kuhn Professor and head of the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Harvard Medical School. Over the course of his career, Dr. Kennedy made major contributions to the biosynthesis of phospholipids, the basic component of all membranes, and to our understanding of membrane function. He discovered the first step of phospholipid synthesis, the reaction of cytidine triphosphate and phosphorylcholine to form cytidine diphosphocholine, as well as the enzyme which catalyzes the reaction. It was Dr. Kennedy who found that a protein, permease, was responsible for the transport of sugars through the bacterial membrane. His research consistently elucidated the structure, localization and biosynthesis of oligosaccharides derived from membranes. Dr. Kennedy's interests also led him to investigate membrane biogenesis and function in bacteria, the translocation of membrane phospholipids, and periplasmic glucans and cell signaling in bacteria. He was the recipient of many honors including the Gairdner Foundation Award and the American Chemical Society's Paul Lewis Award. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Eugene Patrick Kennedy died on September 22, 2011, at the age of 92 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Kennedy was at Harvard as the Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Emeritus. | |
| 35 | Name: | Dr. H. G. Khorana | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1973 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | November 9, 2011 | | | | | | |
Har Gobind Khorana was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with Robert W. Holley and Marshall W. Nirenberg, for describing the genetic code and how it operates in protein synthesis. The team discovered that RNAs with three repeating units produced two alternating amino acids, while RNAs with four repeating units produced only dipeptides and tripeptides. This led them to identify stop codons, and in turn to establish that the biological language common to all living organisms is spelled out in sets of three nucleotides for a specific amino acid. Born in India, Dr. Khorana earned his Ph.D. at Liverpool in 1948. He was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with which he had been associated since 1969. Previously he served as head of the British Columbia Research Council's Organic Chemical Group (1952-60), as visiting professor at Rockefeller University (1958-60), and as professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin (1960-68). The author of many research publications in scientific journals, Dr. Khorana has been honored with the Lasker Award (1968), the Horowitz Prize (1968), the National Medal of Science (1987), and membership in the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1973. Dr. Khorana died November 9, 2011, at the age of 89 in Concord, Massachusetts. | |
| 36 | Name: | Dr. Judith P. Klinman | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Judith Klinman has made significant contributions to our understanding of enzyme function, including two fundamental discoveries, rare events in the field of enzymology: a new redox cofactor in eukaryotes and the unanticipated demonstration of hydrogen tunneling in enzymatic reactions. The latter provides an experimental link to the role of protein motions in catalysis. In addition, she has been a leader in utilizing isotope effects to probe enzymatic reaction mechanisms and has also begun to unravel the mechanism of copper dependent biological redox reactions. Her approach amply demonstrates the rewards of applying the principles and tools of physical organic chemistry to biological sciences. Dr. Klinman has worked at the Institute of Cancer Research (1972-78) and the University of Pennsylvania (1974-78); since 1982 she has been professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also chaired the department of chemistry (2000-03) and serves as professor of molecular and cell biology. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; the National Academy of Sciences; the American Chemical Society; the Protein Society; the Biophysics Society; and the American Society of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (president, 1998). In 2014 she was awarded the National Medal of Science. | |
| 37 | Name: | Dr. Arthur Kornberg | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 1960 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1918 | | | Death Date: | October 26, 2007 | | | | |
| 38 | Name: | Dr. Daniel E. Koshland | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1988 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1920 | | | Death Date: | July 23, 2007 | | | | |
| 39 | Name: | Dr. Henry A. Lardy | | | Institution: | University of Wisconsin, Madison | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1917 | | | Death Date: | August 4, 2010 | | | | | | |
Henry A. Lardy was the Vilas Professor of Biological Sciences Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was introduced to biochemical research as an undergraduate at South Dakota State University in 1937. The Experiment Station Chemistry Laboratory employed two or three chemistry majors during their junior and senior years, and he was fortunate to be selected. In his senior thesis research he reported a treatment for selenium poisoning in animals that was successful in treating a human case. In May of 1939 he became a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin and there discovered a medium that permitted sperm storage for 7 - 10 days with retention of motility and fertilizing capacity and made artificial insemination practical. While studying the metabolism of sperm he discovered the uncoupling of oxidative phosphorylation by dinitrophenol. After a year of postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Herman Fischer at the University of Toronto, he returned to the University of Wisconsin as an assistant professor. His research with graduate students involved carbohydrate chemistry and metabolism which led to our proving that the "nonphosphorylating glycolsis" of the Needham school was non-existent. He also discovered that the metabolic function of the vitamin Biotin is to fix carbon dioxide into organic structures. In 1950 the university opened an "Institute for Enzyme Research," and Dr. Lardy was one of two professors designated to conduct research and train students and postdoctoral fellows in the facility. From then until 1988, he supervised the worked of 60 graduate students and more postdoctorate fellows. Their research was summarized in Comprehensive Biochemistry, Vol. 36 (1986) and in a "Reflections" chapter in the Journal of Biological Chemistry 278:3499 (2003). After becoming Emeritus Professor, Lardy's research has dealt with steroids that cause weight loss in obese persons and animals, improve memory and decrease cholesterol. Lardy had continued to be an active member of the university's bioscience community until just months before his death on August 4, 2010 at the age of 92. | |
| 40 | Name: | Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini | | | Institution: | European Brain Research Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1986 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | December 30, 2012 | | | | | | |
Neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin, Italy and was a dual citizen of Italy and the United States. In 1986 she received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the nerve growth factor (NGF), a protein molecule that enhances differentiative processes of the sensory and sympathetic neurons and may exert a modulatory role on neuro-immunoendocrine functions of vital importance in the regulation of homeostatic processes. Much of Dr. Levi-Montalcini's most important work was conducted over her three decades at Washington University in St. Louis. She also directed the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Rome) from 1961-69 and the Laboratory of Cellular Biology from 1969-78. Her many awards and honors include the National Medal of Science (1987) and a 2001 Senate-for-life nomination by Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. In 1968 Dr. Levi-Montalcini became the tenth woman ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. At age 98, she was the oldest living Nobel laureate. Rita Levi-Montalcini died December 30, 2012, at the age of 103, at her home in Rome, Italy. | |
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