Subdivision
| • | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Konrad E. Bloch | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1966 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1912 | | | Death Date: | October 15, 2000 | | | | |
| 2 | 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. | |
| 3 | 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 | | | | |
| 4 | 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. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Arthur B. Pardee | | | Institution: | Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1921 | | | Death Date: | February 24, 2019 | | | | | | |
Arthur Beck Pardee received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1947. He was an assistant and associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1949-61 and professor of biochemical sciences and Donner Professor of Science at Princeton University from 1961-75. He was a senior postdoctoral fellow at the Pasteur Institute, France from 1957-58 and an American Cancer Society Scholar at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory, London, from 1972-73. In 1975 he moved to Cambridge to serve as Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Cell Growth and Regulation at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. From 1997 on he was professor emeritus at Harvard.
Arthur Pardee's early work was in bacterial biochemistry. His studies on growth regulation led to discoveries of repression of gene transcription, feedback inhibition, and allosteric regulation. He next turned to cancer and identified the restriction point, a major regulatory checkpoint that must be bypassed before cells can initiate DNA synthesis. He demonstrated that an unstable protein must be synthesized for a cell to enter S phase, a process defective in cancer cells. He identified cyclin E as the potential restriction point protein, and factor in growth control at the G1/S boundary. An important technical contribution was the development of "differential display," a method that identifies differences in gene expression in various cells and tissues. Dr. Pardee was a recipient of the Paul Lewis Award of the American Chemical Society, the Sir H. A. Krebs Medal, the Rosensteil Medal, the FASEB 3B Award, the CIT Award, the Boehringer-Mannheim Bioanalytica Award, and the Outstanding Alumnus Award of the California Institute of Technology. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Japanese Biochemical Society, the American Society of Biological Chemists (president, 1980), and the American Association for Cancer Research (president, 1985). He was member of the Cancer Institute Scientific Committee and served on the scientific board of the Worcester Foundation. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2001. Arthur Pardee died February 24, 2019 at the age of 97. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Jack W. Szostak | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Dr. Jack W. Szostak is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and the Alex Rich Distinguished Investigator in the Dept. of Molecular Biology and the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Szostak is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Szostak’s early research was on the genetics and biochemistry of DNA recombination, which led to the double-strand-break repair model for meiotic recombination. At the same time Dr. Szostak made fundamental contributions to our understanding of telomere structure and function, and the role of telomere maintenance in preventing cellular senescence. For this work Dr. Szostak shared, with Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider, the 2006 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the 1990s Dr. Szostak and his colleagues developed in vitro selection as a tool for the isolation of rare functional RNA, DNA and protein molecules from large pools of random sequences. His laboratory has used in vitro selection and directed evolution to isolate and characterize numerous nucleic acid sequences with specific ligand binding and catalytic properties. For this work, Dr. Szostak was awarded, along with Dr. Gerald Joyce, the 1994 National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology and the 1997 Sigrist Prize from the University of Bern. In 2000, Dr. Szostak was awarded the Medal of the Genetics Society of America, and in 2008 Dr. Szostak received the H.P. Heineken Prize in Biophysics and Biochemistry. Dr. Szostak’s current research interests are in the laboratory synthesis of self-replicating systems and the origin of life. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Don Craig Wiley | | | Institution: | Harvard & Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1996 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | Death Date: | November 16, 2001 | | | | |
| 8 | 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. | |
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