Schekman Going to Kansas City, Kansas City, Here He Comes
This Thursday and Friday, March 24-25, Nobel laureate and former ASCB president Randy Schekman will be the featured speaker at the 100th Anniversary celebrations for the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences (KCU). ASCB member, ASCB Ambassador for the Kansas City metro area, and KCU faculty member Abdulbaki Agbas is one of the organizers of this year’s KCU Research Symposium on Friday. Agbas says that the Kansas City research community is especially invited to Schekman’s Thursday talk and reception.
Investigative Skin in the Game, Misteli and Chuong Giving Honors Lectures
Tom Misteli, who is a newly appointed NIH Distinguished Investigator and a Senior Deputy Director for Research at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, is the 2016 recipient of the Herman Beerman Award of the Society for Investigative Dermatology. Misteli will give the named lecture at the SID meeting in Flagstaff, AZ, in May. Also at the SID meeting, Cheng-Ming Chuong, a professor of pathology (and a world expert on the evolution of dinosaur feathers) at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, will give the society’s Albert M. Kligman/Phillip Frost Leadership Lecture Award. Both are longtime ASCB members.
Allen Institute’s New Team To Build an Animated Cell
The new Allen Institute for Cell Science in Seattle has announced its first four Scientific Directors including ASCB members Graham Johnson and Susanne Rafelski. Together the four will build what they are calling the Animated Cell, “a multi-scale, spatiotemporal, animated model of how the cell executes its functions and what goes wrong in disease.” With the two other Scientific Directors, Ruwanthi Gunawardane and Winifred Wiegrabe, Johnson and Rafelski explain their project in a video shot inside the new eye-popping institute building. Rick Horwitz, Executive Director of the Allen Institute for Cell Science and a longtime ASCB member, also explained his career and his plans for the institute in a recent JCB interview.
Cell Biology and Poetry: Jason Wolfe Remembered
When Jason Wolfe, a longtime ASCB member and undergrad research advocate at Wesleyan University, died of acute myeloid leukemia in December 2014, his wife of 31 years, Vera Schwarcz, a Professor of Chinese History at Wesleyan and a published poet, inherited his subscriptions to Science and Nature. The journals were a bridge back to Jason, Schwarcz wrote. “At first it was a way of keeping a conversation going, knowing how much he had enjoyed sharing tidbits from those journals over dinner. Now I had to ferret them out on my own.”
The cell biology of cancer and memory merged in Schwarcz’s new book of poetry called The Physics of Wrinkle Formation. A poem called “Seeds You Left Behind” begins:
The cell’s garbage can
Is far from motionless.
Biologists have likened
exosome to drones
carrying dangerous cargo
from place to place,
sponging off debris
sometimes adding to it,
helping cancers grow.
About the Author:
John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.
