Marine Biological Laboratory

Friday Evening Lecture Series

07/22/11
Lillie Auditorium, 8:00 PM

Porter Lecture – "The Origin of Life"
Jack W. Szostak, Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, 2009

Introduction by Marlene Belfort

Lecture Abstract:
The complexity of modern biological life has long made it difficult to understand how life could emerge spontaneously from the chemistry of the early earth. The key to resolving this mystery lies in the simplicity of the earliest living cells. I will describe how efforts to design and build very simple living cells are testing our assumptions about the nature of life, generating ideas about how life emerged from chemistry, and even offering clues as to how modern life evolved from its earliest ancestors.

Dr. Jack W. Szostak is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and the Alex Rich Distinguished Investigator in the Dept. of Molecular Biology and the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Szostak is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Szostak’s early research on the genetics and biochemistry of DNA recombination led to the double-strand-break repair model for meiotic recombination. At the same time Dr. Szostak made fundamental contributions to our understanding of telomere structure and function, and the role of telomere maintenance in preventing cellular senescence. For this work Dr. Szostak shared, with Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider, the 2006 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In the 1990s Dr. Szostak and his colleagues developed in vitro selection as a tool for the isolation of functional RNA, DNA and protein molecules from large pools of random sequences. His laboratory has used in vitro selection and directed evolution to isolate and characterize numerous nucleic acid sequences with specific ligand binding and catalytic properties. For this work, Dr. Szostak was awarded, along with Dr. Gerald Joyce, the 1994 National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology and the 1997 Sigrist Prize from the University of Bern. In 2000, Dr. Szostak was awarded the Medal of the Genetics Society of America, and in 2008 Dr. Szostak received the H.P. Heineken Prize in Biophysics and Biochemistry.

Dr. Szostak’s current research interests are in the laboratory synthesis of self-replicating systems and the origin of life.

Dr. Marlene Belfort will introduce Dr. Jack Szostak. Dr. Belfort is Director of the Division of Genetic Disorders at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, Albany and Distinguished Professor of Molecular Genetics at SUNY Albany. She is an adjunct professor in the Departments of Biology (SUNY) and both Biology and Chemical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). After graduating with a B.S. degree from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, Dr. Belfort received her Ph.D. degree in molecular biology at the University of California at Irvine, and performed post-doctoral work at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel, where she holds an honorary doctorate. She chaired the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Microbial Genetics study section, served on the board of directors of the RNA Society, and currently serves on the Board of Advisors of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Evolutionary Biology Program, and the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle. Dr. Belfort has organized international meetings in nucleic acid dynamics and evolution for the Keystone Conferences, FASEB, and Gordon Research Conferences and has served on the editorial board of the journals Gene, Methods in Molecular and Cellular Biology, RNA, Nucleic Acids Research, Journal of Molecular Biology, and Journal of Bacteriology. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology. Her research interests are in molecular biology, its impact on evolution, and application to biotechnology. Her research is funded by grants from the NIH and the National Science Foundation.

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.