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The Gail and Elkan Blout Lecture
7/25/08 - 8:30 AM - Candle House 104
"The Amazing Travel of Malaria Sporozoites"
Victor Nussenzweig, New York University School of Medicine
Victor Nussenzweig Ph.D., M.D. is the Hermann M. Biggs Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Pathology (Experimental) at NYU Medical Center. He is the Head of the Michael Heidelberger Division of Pathology of Infectious Diseases Immunology/Malaria biology and vaccine development.
Dr. Nussenzweig received his graduate and medical education from the University Of Sao Paulo School Of Medicine, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
He is currently working on the immunobiology of intracellular protozoan parasites. His lab is working on two major areas of research: the immunobiology of the pre-erythrocytic stages of malaria parasites and the development of a malaria vaccine. Minutes after a mosquito bite, malaria sporozoites enter hepatocytes. Two membrane proteins of sporozoites named CS and TRAP are involved in the initial stages of infection. By gene targeting his lab creates parasite lines that bear subtle mutations in specific domains of CS and in TRAP to study the function of these molecules. The aim is to use this information to increase the efficacy of existing CS-based vaccines.
About the Gail and Elkan Blout Lecture
This lectureship is named after Elkan Blout and his wife, Gail.
Elkan Rogers Blout was born in Manhattan in 1919. After graduating from Princeton, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia in 1942. In the 1950s, Dr. Blout pursued parallel but distinct paths at Harvard and at the Polaroid Corporation, where he was a vice president and general manager of research.
At Polaroid, he led the team that worked out the color developing process for the company’s signature instant film, creating new photographic dyes and developing agents and discovering ways to make them in quantity. At the same time, Dr. Blout was embarking on biochemical research at Harvard, studying peptides and polypeptides, which are building blocks in assembling the body’s proteins. In 1962, he left industry to devote his energy to synthesizing peptides in the laboratory and to examining their structures. A former student of Dr. Blout’s at Harvard said he was “highly respected for the quality and rigorousness of his research,” but he was also known as a warm and supportive lab head. “Everyone really loved working with him, [and] he fostered a very good feeling wherever he went.”
From 1978 to 1989, Dr. Blout was dean for academic affairs at Harvard’s School of Public Health. In the 1990s he became a senior adviser for science at the Food and Drug Administration, where he reviewed standards, helped plan for the agency’s future staff and laboratory needs, and coordinated research conducted by its scientists. He retired from Harvard in 1991.
In 1990, he was awarded a National Medal of Science.
Dr. Blout died on December 20, 2006 at the age of 87. He is survived by two sons, James, of Concord, Massachusetts, and William, of Lexington, Massachusetts; two daughters, Susan Merry Lausch, of Chicago, and Darya, of Cambridge; and 10 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren. Gail Blout lives in Cambridge and Marion, Massachusetts.
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