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About the Club Biotech Guest Lecture on April 9th 2003 with:
Nobel Laureate Susumu Tonegawa
"A
New Integrative Approach for the Study of Memory Mechanisms."
The 9th of April was
without a doubt a big day for us - the members of the Club
Biotech.
We were pleased to welcome Susumu Tonegawa, Whitehead Professor of Biology and
Neuroscience at the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston (USA),
as a featured speaker.
At first glance this name will be unfamiliar to many readers, however, those
of you that have studied immunology have been confronted with his work. He provided
the answer to the $64.000-question: "How does the genome, consisting of
only about 30.000 genes, determine the specificity of billions of different
antibodies"? While working in Basel in the 70s, Prof. Tonegawa recognized
that the virtually unlimited antibody-diversity is generated through somatic
recombination of different gene-segments. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
was the logical outcome of this research.
Despite all this, Prof. Tonegawa´s Club
Biotech
Lecture concerned on something completely different. It was hosted by the "Lord
of the Fly's nervous system", Prof. Barry Dickson from the Research Institute
of Molecular Pathology, Vienna. A press conference was planned to precede the
lecture, but unfortunately none of the journalists that had previously expressed
an interest to interview Prof. Tonegawa showed up.
For the past several years, Prof. Tonegawa focused on the mechanisms of memory
generation. His interest in this area led him to concentrate his research on
a certain brain region, the hippocampus. Tonegawa managed to generate mice in
which deletion of a certain subunit (NR1) of the NMDA-receptor (NR1) gene is
restricted to different cell layers of the hippocampus, using these mice as
a novel approach to determine how different kinds of memory are established.
Interest in Prof. Tonegawa's presentation was enormous and the big lecture hall
was crowded, and after the lecture a lively discussion developed between our
speaker and the attendees. In fact, after 45 minutes the discussion had to be
interrupted by our host otherwise people would have come up with questions until
midnight!
Following the official part, we (=twelve students of Club
Biotech)
went to dinner with Prof.Tonegawa, Prof. Dickson and Wolf-Dietrich von Fircks
- he is the Rector of the University of Veterinary Medicine - in one of the most
famous restaurants in Vienna, the "Plachutta". There we had the unique
opportunity to converse with our guest and thus to discover more about his fascinating
live and work. After dinner around midnightwe accompanied Prof.Tonegawa back
to his hotel-thus concluding a very exciting day.
We had a great and unique day both
scientifically and socially,
and we hope that our guest and all the other people who took part felt the same!
For more insight about this event please also have a look at our photo gallery
below!
MP(IV/03)
|
Club Biotech Lecture with SUSUMU TONEGAWA
(April 9th 2003) |
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