Nobel Laureate to Speak at MBL Tomorrow

Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner, M.D., who discovered the infectious proteins that cause "mad cow disease" in cattle, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, and other neurodegenerative diseases, will discuss the latest developments in this field at the August 5 Friday Evening Lecture at 8pm in the MBL's Lillie Auditorium on MBL Street in Woods Hole.

The lecture, titled "The Broad Spectrum of Prion-Like Diseases and the Quest for Therapeutics," is free and open to the public.

In 1982, Dr. Stanley Prusiner discovered an unprecedented class of pathogens he named prions.  These small infectious proteins are capable of causing fatal dementia-like diseases in humans and animals.  With this discovery, which earned him the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, Dr. Prusiner added prions to the list of well-known infectious agents including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites.

Prion diseases are rare disorders that affect the nervous system and, in humans, impair brain function, causing memory changes, personality changes, dementia, and problems with movement that worsen over time. Dr. Prusiner demonstrated that prions are formed when a normal, benign cellular protein acquires an altered shape that results in pathological changes in the brain. He also described a novel disease paradigm, showing that prions cause disorders in humans that manifest variously as sporadic, inherited, or infectious illnesses. His discoveries spurred vehement debate among scientists for many years.

Dr. Prusiner's current research includes efforts to find drug therapies that retard neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and prion diseases.

The Friday Evening Lecture Series will continue throughout the summer at the MBL.  The remaining lectures in the series are below.  For more information, visit www.mbl.edu/FEL.

August 11, 2011

"The Biochemistry of Inflammation: from Microciona to the Microbiome" by Gerald Weissmann, New York University School of Medicine 

August 12, 2011

"Genetic Insight Into Candida Infection Biology" by Aaron P. Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University

August 19, 2011

"Revisiting the Heuser and Reese Synapse in the 21st Century: Do Nerve Cells Kiss?" by Erik M. Jorgensen, University of Utah, Howard Hughes Medical Institute