Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

This lecture, established in 2011, recognizes Marshall Nirenberg for his work to decipher the genetic code, which resulted in his receiving the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Nirenberg’s research career at the NIH spanned more than 50 years, and his research also focused on neuroscience, neural development, and the homeobox genes. The Nirenberg lecture recognizes outstanding contributions to genetics and molecular biology.

Progress in Sickle Cell: Can the Long Biomedical Arc Bend Toward Equity?

Alexis A. Thompson, M.D., MPH
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

Sickle cell disease has played many substantive roles in advances across biomedical research, yet, until recently, translation of this progress to improvement in patient outcomes have been elusive. This presentation will summarize the accomplishments over time, focusing on newer and potentially transformational therapies, acknowledging continued impediments and exploring opportunities to further make an impact on this condition.

Presentation Objectives

How Do You Feel? The Molecules That Sense Touch

Ardem Patapoutian, Ph.D.
Scripps Research

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

Ardem Patapoutian is an Armenian-American molecular biologist, neuroscientist, and Nobel Prize laureate. He is known for his work in characterizing the PIEZO1, PIEZO2, and TRPM8 receptors that detect pressure, menthol, and temperature. Patapoutian is a neuroscience professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. In 2021, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with David Julius.

Heterogeneity of Breast Cancer Genomes: Going Beyond Therapy to Risk Assessment and Precision Healthcare

Olufunmilayo Olopade, M.D.
University of Chicago

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

(This will be a hybrid lecture, in person at Lipsett Amphitheather and on NIH VideoCast.) Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, with an estimated 2.3 million new cases diagnosed in 2021 worldwide. Geographic variations in age specific incidence and mortality point to differences in etiology. Decades after discovery, the estrogen receptor remains the single most important determinant of outcomes in breast cancer but innovative and precise biology-driven approaches to therapy are being integrated into clinical practice.

Colliding Ribosomes Function as a Sentinel for Cellular Distress

Rachel Green, Ph.D.
John Hopkins School of Medicine

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

For this talk, Dr. Green will describe her laboratory’s recent efforts to define how ribosome elongation distress is connected to cellular signaling pathways involved in cell fate determination. She will discuss how colliding ribosomes are central to this activation, and she will elucidate how a combination of approaches — from genetics, to biochemistry, to structural biology, to genomics — can reveal such insights.

Innovation by evolution: bringing new chemistry to life

Frances Arnold, Ph.D.
California Institute of Technology

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

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.

Base editing: chemistry on a target nucleotide in the genome of living cells

David R. Liu, Ph.D.
Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

Point mutations represent the majority of known human genetic variants associated with disease but are difficult to correct cleanly and efficiently using standard genome-editing methods. For his lecture, Dr. Liu will describe the development, application, and evolution of base editing, a novel approach to genome editing that directly converts a target base pair to another base pair in living cells without requiring DNA backbone cleavage or donor DNA templates.

The future of genetic codes and BRAIN codes

George Church, Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

Dr. Church’s lecture will focus on transformative technologies moving at exponential rates for reading, writing and editing genomes, epigenomes, and other omes. Applications include cells resistant to all viruses via new genetic codes, production and analysis of organs for transplantation, and therapy testing.

The AML genome(s): Mutations in four dimensions

Timothy J. Ley, M.D.
Washington University School of Medicine

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

For many years, Dr. Ley’s laboratory has used mouse models of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) to establish key principles of AML pathogenesis. The lab established that the initiating event for Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia is the PML-RARA fusion gene created by the t(15;17) that is found in nearly all patients with this disease. The roles of cooperating mutations and the cellular milieu for APL pathogenesis have also been established.

Lost in Translation: Do males and females read their genomes differently?

David C. Page, M.D.
HHMI – Whitehead Institute

Marshall W. Nirenberg Lecture

Dr. Page’s laboratory seeks to understand fundamental differences between males and females in health and disease, both within and beyond the reproductive tract. Most recently, the Page lab discovered that XY and XX sex chromosomes account for subtle differences in the molecular biology of male and female cells and tissues throughout the body. These findings emerged from the lab’s comparative genomic and evolutionary studies of the sex chromosomes of humans, other mammals, and birds.

This page was last updated on Tuesday, August 10, 2021