Smithies' Nobel Money Will Fund Symposium

Posted on March 3, 2011

During his undergraduate years at Oxford University, Oliver Smithies attended a series of lectures by world-renowned chemist Linus Pauling. Now Smithies, a Nobel laureate and the Weatherspoon Eminent Distinguished Professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Carolina, will begin inspiring a new generation of scientists by using money that came with his prize to fund annual symposia at UNC featuring lectures by other Nobel laureates.

The events are aimed at highlighting the importance of postdoctoral scholars, allowing them to present their research and interact with high caliber scientists.

On March 8, Thomas A. Steitz, Sterling Professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and professor of chemistry at Yale University, will deliver the inaugural lecture at the Oliver Smithies Nobel Symposium.

The lecture, on the structure and function of the ribosome and new antibiotics, will be from 3 to 5 p.m. in the Medical Biomolecular Research Building Auditorium.

Steitz is one of three winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work describing the structure and function of the ribosome, an enormously complex cellular ensemble of numerous proteins and RNA components. Steitz and his colleagues built upon research of the past half century to describe in minute detail the architecture of this protein-making machinery, the key to the function of all life.

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More online…

• A Humble Scientist Gets the Proverbial Phone Call
  News report from October 2007
• The First Nobel: Oliver Smithies’ Work Pays Off: Oliver Smithies’ genetics research, whispered for years to be worthy ultimately of the biggest prize in medicine, has implications for virtually every disease that has a genetic basis. From the November/December 2007 Carolina Alumni Review, available online to Carolina Alumni members.

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