Nobel Laureate Presents Sesquicentennial Lecture in the Eberly College of Science on 17 September

10 September 2004-- Nobel Laureate Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor of Biology and founding director of the McGovern Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will present a Sesquicentennial Lecture on 17 September 2004 at 11:00 a.m. in the Berg Auditorium in the Life Sciences Building on the Penn State University Park campus. The free public lecture, titled "The Surprising Biology of Short RNA," is sponsored by the Eberly College of Science and the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society.

Sharp will discuss the discovery of RNA regulation of gene expression and the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), or the silencing of gene expression by double-stranded RNA molecules. According to Sharp, "RNAi is a powerful experimental tool for learning what genes do. It also is an evolutionarily ancient method of genome defence in many organisms."

Sharp's research interests have centered on the molecular biology of gene expression relevant to cancer and the mechanisms of RNA splicing. His landmark achievement was the discovery of RNA splicing in 1977, which provided one of the first indications of the phenomenon of "discontinuous genes" in mammalian cells. The discovery that genes contain "nonsense" segments that are edited out by cells in the course of using genetic information is important in understanding the genetic causes of cancer and other diseases. For this work he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Richard Roberts, now at New England Biolabs in Massachusetts, who conducted parallel research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Sharp's work also has been honored with the Gairdner Foundation International Award; a General Motors Research Foundation Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize for Cancer Research; the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University; and an Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the NAS Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Sharp co-founded Biogen, Inc. in 1978, was chairman of the scientific advisory board until 2002, and is a member of the board of directors of Biogen Idec, Inc., formed in 2003 when Biogen merged with IDEC Pharmaceuticals. He also co-founded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in 2002, where he serves as chairman of the scientific advisory board and a member of the board of directors.

He earned his doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of Illinois in 1969, and his bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics at Union College in Kentucky in 1966. He conducted postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology from 1969 to 1971. He was a postdoctoral fellow and senior researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory until he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. He was director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research from 1985 to 1991 and served as head of the Department of Biology from 1991 to 1999, when he was named Institute Professor and director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

The Sesquicentennial Lecture is part of a year-long celebration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of The Pennsylvania State University in 1855. More information about the celebration that will continue through spring of 2005, including historical information and schedules of events, can be found online at: http://www.sesquicentennial.psu.edu/. For more information about this lecture, contact the Eberly College of Science Office of Alumni Relations and Development at 800-297-1429 or 814-865-0511.

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