Stephen Desiderio, professor of
molecular biology and
genetics at the School of Medicine, has been named
director of the school's
Institute for Basic
Biomedical Sciences. The institute was formed in
December 2000 to unite the school's eight basic science
departments and several hundred scientists.
Desiderio replaces Jeremy Berg, who is leaving Johns
Hopkins to head the National Institute of General Medical
Sciences at the National Institutes of Health.
"Steve is the right person at the right time to
spearhead our phenomenal basic science group," said Edward
D. Miller, dean of the medical school and CEO of Johns
Hopkins Medicine. "As this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry
illustrates, basic science discoveries drive many of the
advances in medicine that benefit us all. But they require
an infrastructure that no longer can be provided by
individual laboratories or departments. That's where the
role of a coordinated institute — and its leader
— steps in."
Desiderio, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical
Institute investigator, said, "I view the mission of the
Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences as facilitating
fundamental research. Fundamental research will always be
important because it's impossible to predict where
scientific investigations may lead. But it's very exciting
that advances in genetics, genomics and computer science
are offering a direct avenue to using science to understand
disease and eventually treat or cure it," he said. "The
promise of understanding disease is finally being
realized.
"The way science is evolving," he added, "the distance
between what we call fundamental or basic science and more
clinically oriented science has shrunk, partly because
basic science has been able to study ever more complex
systems, and clinical investigation has become more
sophisticated. We have new tools at our disposal that allow
us to look across an entire genome and manipulate the
genetics of whole organisms."
At Johns Hopkins, for instance, major new efforts are
under way to use proteomics — the study of people's
proteins — and genomics — the study of people's
genomes — to make headway against sudden cardiac
death, cancer and psychiatric and neurological
conditions.
Desiderio is a member of the American Society for
Clinical Investigation, unusual for a member of a basic
science department. His own research focuses on the
molecular mechanisms underlying development and function of
the immune system.
Desiderio received a bachelor's degree in biology and
Russian from Haverford College in 1974 and his doctorate
and medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine in 1981. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT until
1984, when he returned to Hopkins as an associate of the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an assistant professor
of molecular biology and genetics. He was the 1980
recipient of the Michael A. Shanoff Award, the most
prestigious of Hopkins' annual Young Investigators' Day
awards for doctoral candidates.
The Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences links the
departments of Biological Chemistry, Biomedical
Engineering, Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry,
Molecular Biology and Genetics, Molecular Cell Biology,
Neuroscience, Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, and
Physiology on the East Baltimore medical campus.
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