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Friday Evening Lecture Series
06/17/11
Lillie Auditorium, 8:00 PM
"Growth, Death and Regeneration: Genetic studies in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster"
Iswar K. Hariharan, American Cancer Society Research Professor, University of California Berkeley
Introduction by Nipam Patel
Lecture Abstract:
In 1927, J. B. S. Haldane wrote: “The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them.” Since then, there have been remarkable advances in the understanding of mechanisms that instruct parts of a developing embryo to elaborate specific structures. However, we still have a very poor understanding of why animals achieve a typical size at the end of their growth phase. For instance, why are most strains of mice roughly the same size, and more importantly, why are they all smaller than rats? Another poorly understood aspect of growth is that which occurs during tissue regeneration. Ablation of a quarter of a zebrafish’s heart results in the re-growth of the missing portion while humans can only replace damaged portions of their heart with fibrous scar tissue. Why are some animals capable of amazing feats of regeneration and others not?
Dr. Iswar K. Hariharan uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to study the mechanisms that regulate growth during normal development and during tissue regeneration. Since the “cellular circuitry” that regulates growth in Drosophila is similar to that found in humans, his studies also provide insights into the mechanisms that normally regulate growth in humans and the abnormal growth that occurs in diseases such as cancer. Dr. Hariharan heads the Division of Cell and Developmental Biology at UC Berkeley’s Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, as well as having been recently appointed an American Cancer Society Research Professor. He received a B.S. in Medicine in 1981, followed by an MB.BS. (the equivalent to the MD degree in the United States) in 1984 from the University of Sydney, Australia, and in 1989, a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Hariharan is an elected Member of American Society of Clinical Investigation and in 2008 was awarded a EUREKA (Exceptional Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration) from the NIH to study the genetic regulation of tissue regeneration in Drosophila. Hariharan has lectured twice in the Embryology course at the MBL.
Dr. Nipam Patel will introduce Dr. Iswar Hariharan. Dr. Patel is professor of Molecular Cell Biology and Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the MBL Embryology course. He studies the evolutionary changes responsible for generating the diversity of life we see on Earth today, with a specific focus on the evolution of body patterning and segmentation at the molecular and genetic level. Dr. Patel received an A.B. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before moving to Berkeley, he was a staff associate in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution, visiting fellow at the Australian National University, and a professor at the University of Chicago. Dr. Patel is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Regeneration Project of the University of Florida and has been awarded numerous honors including an NSF Predoctoral Fellowship, McKnight Scholars Neuroscience Fellowship Award, the Butler Chair at the UC Berkeley, and is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He currently holds editorial positions with the journals Evolution and Development, Development Genes and Evolution, Developmental Biology, Evo-Devo, and American Naturalist, and is an editor for the journal Development.
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