"Untold numbers of people around the world owe their lives and health to Phil Sharp's work," said Arnold Thackray, CHF's president. "Dr. Sharp combines deep originality of mind with unusual gifts of vision, perseverance, and diplomacy. He is not only a Nobel laureate and cofounder of a leading biotech company, but also a major architect of MIT's central importance in the life sciences. We eagerly anticipate learning from his insights when he comes to CHF in November."
Sharp's lecture, "Chemistry, RNA Interference, and Biotechnology: Perspectives and Prospects," is presented by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Philadelphia and Delaware Sections of the American Chemical Society, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.
About Phillip A. Sharp
Since joining MIT in 1974, Sharp has played a major role in the emergence of the institute (and of Cambridge, Massachusetts) as a world leader in the biomolecular sciences and technologies. He was director of its Center for Cancer Research from 1985 to 1991 and chair of the Department of Biology from 1991 to 1999. He served as founding director of the McGovern Institute at MIT from its establishment in 2000 until recently. In 1999 he was named Institute Professor, a title given to a small number of faculty with extraordinary records of achievement.
Sharp codiscovered RNA splicing in 1977. This work provided one of the first indications of the startling phenomenon of "discontinuous genes" in mammalian cells. The discovery that genes conta
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Contact: Neil Gussman
neilg@chemheritage.org
717-314-2494
Chemical Heritage Foundation
13-Oct-2004