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The Jean & Katsuma Dan Lectureship in Embryology/Physiology
July 18, 2007
9:00 AM, Lillie Auditorium
"The Cell Biology of Morphogen Gradients in Drosophila" Eric Wieschaus, Princeton University
Eric F. Wieschaus, Princeton University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Introduction by Timothy Mitchison, Harvard University
Dr. Wieschaus earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from Notre Dame University where he was first introduced to Drosophila. He was fascinated by the early growth of the fertilized egg, which rapidly divides, or cleaves, to form a hollow ball of 16 cells, all of which look the same. He went on to receive his doctoral degree in biology from Yale University in 1974, doing part of his thesis work in Switzerland at the University of Basel with Walter Gehring, a leader in the field of Drosophila genetics and development. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1981 and was named a Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology in 1993.
In 1995, Dr. Wieschaus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine with two other scientists, Christiane Nüssiein-Volhard and Edward B. Lewis, for discovering genetic mechanisms in fruit flies that explain how birth defects and miscarriages occur in humans. At Princeton, Dr. Wieschaus still spends a great deal of time at the bench. He has discovered additional genes that control cell fate in Drosophila, and his work now focuses on defining the relationship between cell fate genes and the step-by-step changes in cell shape and form that occur when these genes are activated.
Dr. Wieschaus is an alumnus of the 1969 MBL Embryology course.
Timothy Mitchison, the Hasib Sabbagh Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard University and Co-director of the MBL Physiology course, will introduce Dr. Wieschaus.
Jean Clark and Katsuma Dan met when they were graduate students of the American physiologist, L.V. Heilbrunn. They studied with him at the University of Pennsylvania and spent their summers at the MBL. Katsuma Dan received his Ph.D. in 1934; Jean Clark received hers in 1936 after which they married and settled in Nagai, a five-mile bike ride to their laboratory in Misaki. They came from vastly different backgrounds: He was the son of a wealthy Japanese baron and she was from Presbyterian Yankee stock, but they shared a love for science, Woods Hole, and the MBL.
Katsuma Dan was one of Japan’s most influential and original biologists, a skillful administrator, and a scientific statesman. He was credited with original studies of marine organisms, their cell division, fertilization, early development, cell differentiation, and lunar-influenced spawning cycles. Katsuma Dan died in 1996 in Osaka, Japan, at the age of 91.
Jean Dan was the progenitor of an international effort to understand the interaction between the sperm and the egg; she discovered the acrosomal reaction that unites sperm to egg cell membrane. Her superb translations of Japanese biological works into English have been instrumental in the export of Japanese discovery to the West. Jean died in 1978, and her ashes were brought back from Japan and scattered on the water near Nobska Point.
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