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.