Stone Lecture Set for 22 October 2007

10 October 2007—Jonathan R. Beckwith, the American Cancer Society Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School, will present the 2007/2008 Stone Memorial Lecture at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, 22 October 2007, in 101 Althouse Laboratory on the Penn State University Park campus. This free public lecture, titled "Making and Breaking Protein Disulfide Bonds: Serendipity, Preconceptions, Ignorance, and Suppressors," is sponsored by the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Beckwith is the author of over 230 scientific publications and over 70 publications on science and social issues. He teaches genetics and does research on bacterial genetics, focusing on gene expression, the mechanism of protein secretion, the structure and function of membrane proteins, disulfide-bond formation in proteins, and cell division.

A renowned scientist, Beckwith has been active in public discussions of issues concerning the social impact of genetics since 1969. He devoted many years to Science for the People, an organization dedicated to demystifying scientific issues for the public and to describing the social and political influences on scientific research and its uses. More recently, as a member of the Genetic Screening Study Group, he has worked on critiques of biological-determinist thinking. He has been critical of such areas as sociobiology, arguments that variation in human traits such as IQ and anti-social behavior are largely due to genetics, and claims that women are inferior to men in their mathematical ability for biological reasons.

Concerned with the social impact of genetic screening programs and of the Human Genome Project, Beckwith was appointed to the first Working Group on Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of the Human Genome Project at the National Center for Human Genome Research (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health. In addition, his study group has published two reports on surveys that reveal "genetic discrimination" from the use of information from genetic tests in such areas as health insurance resulting. Beckwith is also the author of a memoir titled "Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science" (Harvard University Press, 2002).

He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1957. He earned his doctoral degree from Harvard University in 1961.

The Stone Memorial Lecture honors Robert W. Stone, head for 23 years of the former Department of Microbiology, which merged with the biophysics and biochemistry departments in 1979 to form the present Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

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