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The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University April 14, 2008 | Vol. 37 No. 30
 
Nobel Laureate Andrew Fire to Give 2008 Morgan Lecture

By Lisa De Nike
Homewood

Andrew Fire, a Stanford University professor who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, will give the 2008 Thomas Hunt Morgan Lecture, part of the Pioneers in Biology lecture series, on Thursday, April 17.

His talk will take place at 4 p.m. in Mudd Hall Auditorium on the Homewood campus.

Fire, who also has been an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins since 1989, shared the Nobel with Craig C. Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The duo was honored for discoveries related to RNA interference, a process that could eventually allow researchers to "turn off" the genes that trigger various illnesses. Since Fire and Mello published their findings in 1998, RNAi has become a widespread research tool.

"We are excited to have Dr. Fire back to share his story with us," said Aaron Stephan, a graduate student in the Department of Biology and co-chair of the Pioneers in Biology committee. "Dr. Fire went to Stanford just one year before I came to Johns Hopkins, so this will be the first time I, and many of my classmates, have actually met him. We're all proud that he did his prize-winning work right here at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, an affiliate of JHU's Department of Biology."

Pioneers in Biology was organized in 2005 to expose Johns Hopkins students to Nobel-caliber scientists.

The Thomas Hunt Morgan Lecture takes its name from a researcher who won a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1933. Morgan arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1886 to work in a then fledgling Biology Department and earned his doctorate at the university in 1890 for work he did with sea spiders. He spent much of his career at Columbia University, where he won the Nobel.

For more about Pioneers in Biology, go to: www.bio.jhu.edu/Events/Pioneers/default.htm.

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