Member Update: December 2019

Hartl, Lee win Breakthrough Prize

Two of the five winners of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences are members of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

F. Ulrich HartlF. Ulrich Hartl, managing director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, and Virginia Man-Yee Lee, a professor in Alzheimer’s research at the University of Pennsylvania, are among the recipients of the $3 million award, one of three awarded annually by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and known collectively as the “Oscars of Science.” The foundation also selected recipients in physics and mathematics.

Hartl shares the honor with Arthur L. Horwich of the Yale School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for discovering functions of molecular chaperones in mediating protein folding and preventing protein aggregation, which can be a precursor to cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Virginia Man-Yee LeeLee is a John H. Ware endowed professor in Alzheimer’s research at the Perelman School of Medicine, director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research and co-director of the Marian S. Ware Center for Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Program. She is honored for discovering TDP43 protein aggregates in frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and for showing that different forms of alpha-synuclein in different cell types underlie Parkinson’s disease and multiple system atrophy.

Jeffrey M. Friedman and David Julius also received the life sciences prize. The recipients were honored at an awards ceremony in November at the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

National Academy of Medicine elects new members

Five members of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology are among the 90 new regular members and 10 new international members elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

The newly elected members include:

Beverly L. Davidson, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and director, Raymond G. Perelman Center for Cellular & Molecular Therapy, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Raymond N. DuBois Jr., dean of the college of medicine and professor of biochemistry and medicine, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston.

J. Silvio Gutkind, professor of pharmacology and associate director of basic science, Moores Cancer Center, University of California, San Diego.

Krzysztof Palczewski, director of the Center for Translational Vision Research, Irving H. Leopold chair in ophthalmology and a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.

Anil K. Rustgi, professor of medicine and director, Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center and associate dean of oncology, department of medicine, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York City.

The newly elected members bring the NAM’s total membership to more than 2,200 and the number of international members to approximately 180.

Biophysical Society announces honors

American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology members G. Marius Clore, Dan Herschlag and Alexandra C. Newton are among the recipients of the 2020 Biophysical Society awards. ASBMB members Cynthia Wolberger and Hao Wu have been named 2020 BPS fellows.

G. Marius Clore, a National Institutes of Health distinguished investigator and chief of the Protein Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Section of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, will receive the BPS Innovation Award in recognition of his contributions to the development of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging for determining 3D structures of macromolecules in solution and his work on the development of paramagnetic and relaxation-based NMR experiments to characterize rare, transient and previously invisible states of macromolecules.

Dan Herschlag, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, will receive the society’s Founders Award for his fundamental contributions to RNA folding and enzymology. “The Founders Award allows us to call attention to outstanding achievements in biophysics that are now accepted and used by others, whether that acceptance was immediate or over a period of years,” BPS President Dave Piston stated. “Dan’s work on RNA folding and enzymology has had a ripple effect on the field, leaving a lasting impact on the entire breadth of molecular biophysics.”

Alexandra C. Newton, a professor in the department of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego, will received the BPS Award in the Biophysics of Health and Disease in recognition of her paradigm-shifting discoveries that showed how disease mutations that inhibit protein kinase C activity cause cancer while those that activate PKC are drivers of neurodegenerative diseases.

Cynthia Wolberger is a professor of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research in ubiquitin signaling and regulation of transcription has transformed understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying genes regulation through elegant structural studies.

Hao Wu is the Asa and Patricia Springer professor in the department of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Her use of structural immunology has revised the view of intracellular signaling and cellular organization through discovering supramolecular signalosomes formed by innate immune signaling proteins, mechanisms that govern cooperative assembly, and proximity-driven enzyme activation.

In memoriam: John Oates

John Oates, a physician–scientist on the team that discovered the first blood pressure–lowering drug and who went on to become a pioneer in the study of prostaglandins, died in July in Nashville at age 87.

Oates was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by a former schoolteacher mother and lawyer–historian father. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1953 at what was then Wake Forest College (now University) and his M.D. in 1956 at the college’s Bowman Gray School of Medicine.

He did a stint in the Merchant Marines, at which time he was based in and became fond of New York, and went on to complete his residency at the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center.

Though he was prepared to join the U.S. Air Force as part of the so-called “doctor draft” that sent thousands of medical professionals to the Korean War battlefield, he learned from a peer that working at the National Institutes of Health was an alternative. His chair arranged for him to take a position at the National Heart Institute, according to a 2013 interview in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

In 1959, he and colleagues at the NIH were studying the synthesis and metabolism of aromatic amines (for example, norepinephrine and serotonin) to better understand their roles in high blood pressure. They discovered, quite unexpectedly, that the Merck drug methyldopa (brand name Aldomet), which the company had synthesized as part of a cancer research screen, lowered blood pressure in animal models.

“The pharmacologists at Merck had completed toxicology studies and commented to us that they had given rabbits doses of up to one gram per kilogram without lowering blood pressure or having any adverse effect,” he told Vanderbilt University’s Leigh MacMillan in 2005. “They said it can’t possibly be pharmacologically active.”

Methyldopa ended up being used to treat severe hypertension and, though more effective therapies for high blood pressure have since emerged, still is used today in certain cases, in particular during pregnancy.

Oates moved to Vanderbilt University in 1963 and is credited with founding one of the first divisions of clinical pharmacology, which he led until 1996.

Oates’ team at Vanderbilt did groundbreaking research on prostaglandins, members of the eicosanoid family derived from fatty acids. They determined the role prostaglandins play in renin release by the kidneys, showing that, parallel to the adrenergic nervous system, they affected renin release and blood pressure regulation.

They also found that prostaglandin D2 is a major inflammatory mediator produced by mast cells, which kicked off drug-development studies for allergic rhinitis and asthma.

Oates also is recognized for elucidating the concept of first-pass metabolism, which affects drug concentration. And, in his later years, his group studied small molecules that could be used for diseases driven by oxidative stress, including Alzheimer’s and coronary artery disease.

Oates’ publication list is long, his awards numerous, and his academic progeny widespread. He is survived by his wife, Meredith, three children and four grandchildren.

Read more about Oates, including his interest in wildflowers, in this 2005 Vanderbilt article, and read colleagues’ remembrances here.

Send us your news

Have you recently been promoted or honored? Do you have good news to share with your fellow ASBMB members? Email it to us and don’t forget to include a photo!