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The Gail and Elkan Blout Lecture
6/24/09 - 8:30 AM - Candle House 104
"Viennese Waltz or Woods Hole Rave? How Toxoplasma Rhoptry Proteins Determine the Character of Its Dance with the Infected Host"
John Boothroyd, Stanford University
John Boothroyd received his undergraduate degree in Cell, Molecular, and Developmental Biology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his PhD in Molecular Biology from Edinburgh University in Scotland. He worked as a scientist in the Immunochemistry and Molecular Biology Department at Wellcome Research Laboratories, UK, before joining the Stanford faculty in 1982 as a faculty member in Microbiology and Immunology. He was Department Chair from 1999-2002 and served as Senior Associate Dean for Research and Training from 2002-2005. He has received various awards including being named a Burroughs Wellcome Scholar in Molecular Parasitology in 1986 and an Ellison Medical Foundation Scholar in Global Infectious Diseases in 2002. Dr. Boothroyd’s lab studies the interaction between humans and Toxoplasma gondii, a serious pathogen in newborns and individuals who are immunocompromised. Together with his collaborators, he is asking 1) how Toxoplasma attaches, invades, and grows in almost any cell type from almost any animal; 2) how the parasite persists in the human host; and, 3) what is the genetic basis for the extreme differences in virulence between different strains.
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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