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Friday Evening Lecture Series
06/22/07
Porter Lecture - "Opening Darwin's Black Box: The Reducible Complexity of How Cells Crawl"
Gary Borisy, MBL
Introduction by John E. Dowling
View the podcast (Real Media format)
Lecture Abstract:
Darwin’s Black Box is the title of a book featuring the concept of “irreducible complexity,” by which is meant a system that cannot be produced by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system. This concept is presented as a biochemical challenge to evolution and has been seized upon by advocates of intelligent design. Of interest to a molecular cell biologist is the circumstance that objects of “irreducible complexity” are said to be located at the sub-cellular level, including organelles of motility such as cilia and sperm tails and the flagella of bacteria. Indeed, a fundamental question is how order arises within the cell from an ensemble of molecules. This question will be addressed for the crawling motility of animal cells. An explanation will be offered in which order arises as an emergent property of filament polymerization operating under Darwinian selection at the molecular level.
Gary G. Borisy became the MBL’s13th Director and 3rd CEO in 2006. He came to the MBL from Northwestern University where he was Associate Vice President for Research and the Leslie B. Arey Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology in the Feinberg School of Medicine. He received his B.S. in biochemistry and his Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Chicago. After serving a postdoctoral fellowship in H. E. Huxley's Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the MRC in Cambridge, England, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He spent 32 years at Madison, rising through the professional ranks to Chairman of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Perlman-Bascom Professor of Life Sciences, before moving to Northwestern in 2000. Dr. Borisy is the author of more than 200 papers and the editor of two books and has received numerous professional honors throughout his career, including an NIH MERIT Award and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology (2003); and received the Carl Zeiss Award in 2005 from the German Society for Cell Biology. He currently is a member of the Steering Committee and Chair of the Distinguished Advisory Board for the Encyclopedia of Life project, an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth, and is also a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and the Scientific Advisory Board of the biotech company CombinatoRx.
John E. Dowling, President of the MBL Corporation, will introduce Dr. Borisy. Dr. Dowling received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught in the Biology Department at Harvard from 1961 to 1964, first as an Instructor, then as Assistant Professor. In 1964 he moved to Johns Hopkins University, where he held an appointment as Associate Professor of Ophthalmology and Biophysics. He returned to Harvard as Professor of Biology in 1971, and he is now the Gund Professor of Neurosciences and a Harvard College Professor. Professor Dowling was Chairman of the Biology Department at Harvard from 1975 to 1978, served as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1980 to 1984, and was Master of Leverett House at Harvard from 1981 to 1998. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He has received numerous awards throughout his career including the Friedenwald Medal from the Association of Research in Ophthalmology and Vision, the Annual Award of the New England Ophthalmological Society, and the Llura Ligget Gund Award for Lifetime Achievement and Recognition of Contribution to Foundation Fighting Blindness. In 1987 he received a National Eye Institute MERIT Award, and he was granted an honorary M.D. degree by the University of Lund (Sweden) in 1982.
About the Porter Lecture:
The annual Porter Lecture is held in honor of Dr. Keith Roberts Porter, a former Director of the MBL considered by many to be the "Father" of the field of cell biology. It is sponsored by the Keith R. Porter Endowment whose goal is to support communication and education in cell biology.
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