Marker Lectures in Genetic Engineering Scheduled for 24 and 25 April

17 April 2007—Richard A. Gibbs, the Wofford Cain Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, will present the Russell Marker Lectures in Genetic Engineering on 24 and 25 April 2007 at the Penn State University Park campus. The series includes a lecture intended for a general audience, titled "Genomes Up and Down the Tree," at 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 24 April, in the Berg Auditorium, 100 Life Sciences Building. Gibbs also will give a more specialized lecture, titled "Getting Back to Genetics After Two Decades of Genomics," at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 25 April, in the Berg Auditorium, 100 Life Sciences Building. The free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.

Gibbs is the founder and director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. His group was one of five to complete the Human Genome Project, and it since has collaborated to sequence the genomes of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the mouse, the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, and the rat. Researchers at the center also have sequenced the genomes of Drosophila pseudoobscura, the honey bee, the sea urchin, the red flour beetle, and a number of bacteria that cause serious infections, including Rickettsia typhi, Enterococcus faecium, Mannheimia haemolytica, and Fusobacterium nucleatum. They now are completing the sequencing of the genome of the cow and are collaborating to sequence the genomes of the Rhesus macaque monkey and the wallaby. 

In addition to the genome projects, Gibbs and his colleagues have developed new sequencing technologies and techniques for application to both the genome-sequencing projects and to mutation-discovery projects. As a result, researchers at the Human Genome Sequencing Center are able to characterize hundreds of individual genes at the level of DNA-sequence changes. Their mutation-discovery pipeline has been used successfully for several projects focused on understanding key genetic mutations in diseases such as idiopathic epilepsy and bipolar disorder, also know as manic-depressive disorder. 

Gibbs received a bachelor's degree with honors and a doctoral degree in genetics and radiation biology from the University of Melbourne in Australia in 1979 and 1985, respectively. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor College of Medicine, where he studied the molecular basis of human X-linked diseases and worked on the development of technologies for rapid genetic analysis and for nucleic-acid analysis. In 1991, he joined the faculty at the Baylor College of Medicine and played a key role in the early planning and development phases of the International Human Genome Project.

The Marker Lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from Russell Earl Marker, professor emeritus of chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid-hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth-control pill. The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker Lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences, and physics.

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