Mother Nature Sets the Tune in Cell Biology, Walter Tells Lasker Awards Ceremony

At Monday's UCSF celebration, Lasker winner Peter Walter called all former and present lab members including grad student Kelly Crotty on stage to share in the honors. UCSF photo by Cindy Chew

At Monday’s UCSF celebration, Lasker winner Peter Walter
called all former and present lab members including grad
student Kelly Crotty on stage to share in the honors.
UCSF photo by Cindy Chew

Mother Nature made an unexpected appearance this afternoon at the Lasker Awards luncheon in New York City when Peter Walter of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and ASCB President Elect for 2016, described her as a mix of biological referee, evolutionary trickster, and puzzle mistress. “In biology, Mother Nature presents the playing field, and it is our task to decipher how it works,” Walter declared. “Disconcertingly, Nature deploys the strategy of random walk, of mutation and selection, leading to the evolution of the world that surrounds us. She then presents us with the most fascinating puzzles to decipher: the inherently unpredictable Rube Goldberg machines that make up a living cell.”

Along with Kazutoshi Mori of Kyoto University, Walter was in New York to receive the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for their independent but closely related research that deciphered one of Mother Nature’s trickiest cellular puzzles, the unfolded protein response or UPR, a signaling pathway that protects cells by flagging misfolded proteins in the cytoplasm and switching on a protective response from the nucleus. The two also shared the Lasker’s $250,000 cash prize.

Walter, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, told the Lasker luncheon attendees that his research began with a simple question, “How does one part of the cell know what is happening in another?” His lab came up with a relatively simple answer—it was a kinase receptor, projecting through the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) into the cytosol to detect dangerous accumulations of unfolded proteins. But Mother Nature had other tricks up her sleeve, Walter explained, leading the researchers on a wild chase that led to discovery after discovery of a complex system of feedbacks, transfer RNA, kinase gene segments, and proteins that signal back to the nucleus to degrade or limit misfolded proteins. Protein misfolding is central to a variety of human diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as genetic disorders including cystic fibrosis and retinitis pigmentosa.

At the Lasker awards, Walter continued, “My main point here is that none of this was predictable. Neither I nor Kazu stand here today as genius mathematicians akin to artists, who begin with an empty canvas and control over the elegance of their work. We are explorers — not designers — facing the chaotic randomness of evolution.”

Back in San Francisco on Monday, Walter had addressed UCSF faculty and students gathered in the atrium of Genentech Hall on UCSF’s Mission Bay campus to celebrate Walter’s winning of the Lasker and of the $1 million Shaw Prize in Life Sciences and Medicine last May. Speaking from a staircase overlooking the crowd, Walter insisted that all members of his lab, past and present, come and stand with him. “I did not do any of the work that we celebrate today with my own two hands,” he said. “The research was done by some 30 outstanding graduate students and postdocs over the last 20 years, who joined my lab and fearlessly pushed the field forward.”

As Walter’s blushing and beaming students, postdocs, and former lab members filled the landing and stairs, the crowd below erupted in wild cheering. “This honor really belongs to all of us,” said Walter.

See Peter Walter’s Lasker Foundation interview.

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.