Marc Abrahams founded the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, in 1991. He is editor of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, and former editor of the Journal of Irreproducible Research. He has written 24 mini-operas (about heart repair, bacterial space exploration, atomic/human romance, species mixing, coffee chemistry, the Atkins Diet, human/sheep cloning, cockroaches, incompetence, and much else). He invents ways to make people curious about things they might otherwise avoid.
Not satisfied with nature’s vast catalyst repertoire, we want to create new protein catalysts and expand the space of genetically encoded enzyme functions. I will describe how we can use the most powerful biological design process, evolution, to optimize existing enzymes and invent new ones, thereby circumventing our profound ignorance of how sequence encodes function. Using mechanistic understanding and mimicking nature’s evolutionary processes, we can generate whole new enzyme families that catalyze synthetically important reactions not known in biology.
Kevin L. Gardner, M.D., Ph.D. Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University Medical Center
I am a clinically trained pathologist that studies chromatin based-mechanism of transcriptional control in both cancers of lymphoid and epithelial origin. Recently we have refocused the efforts in my lab to define and reveal how alteration and/or disruption of gene regulation contributes to cancer incidence, evolution, and outcome. An essential and overarching goal of this effort is to translate the biological implications of these observations into principles and tenets that will have a broader impact on the molecular understanding of disease.
Dr. James Allison is the Chair of the Department of Immunology, the Vivian L. Smith Distinguished Chair in Immunology, Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Research, and the Executive Director of the Immunotherapy Platform at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He has spent a distinguished career studying the regulation of T cell responses and developing strategies for cancer immunotherapy. He earned the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Dr.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, August 10, 2021
