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MBL Honors Alumni with Distinguished Friday Evening Lectureship
Spinal Cord Injury Expert Wise Young Presents Inaugural Lecture
For most of its 117-year history, the MBL has offered career-altering courses to some of the world’s most promising young scientists, many of whom go on to become leading research biologists.
To honor its alumni, the MBL recently established the MBL Distinguished Alumni Lecture. Part of the venerable Friday Evening Lecture Series, the Distinguished Alumni Lecture is an annual lecture that will recognize a prominent MBL course alumnus or alumna who is making strides in his or her field of study. There are currently 12,500 MBL course alumni worldwide.
On August 5, 2005 the MBL was privileged to host Neurobiology course alumnus Dr. Wise Young as the first Distinguished Alumni Lecturer. Young, who is founding director of the W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University, is recognized as one of the world’s outstanding neuroscientists and is well known as a leader in spinal cord injury research. In 2001, TIME Magazine named Young, who was the late actor Christopher Reeve’s friend and advisor, as “America’s Best” in the field of spinal cord injury research.
Young spoke to a packed Lillie Auditorium crowd, fondly recalling his time at the MBL—from his discovery of “spreading depression” in the skate cerebellum, to running in the first-ever Falmouth Road Race, to meeting Lily, his wife of more than 30 years, as they shuffled through stacks of letters in the MBL mailroom.
Much of Young’s research focuses on stem cells and nerve regeneration. He spoke in his lecture on how recent advances in the field promise to produce a paradigm shift that may revolutionize our views of biology. “We are currently in the process of revisiting and changing all of the rules of biology as a result of stem cell research,” he said.
In Young’s lab, scientists are transplanting stem cells derived from neonatal blood and umbilical cord blood into the spinal cord of rats after injury. Preliminary findings suggest that these cells will survive and migrate in the spinal cord and help restore nerve function. Young explained in his lecture that stem cells appear to be differentiated cells that are highly specialized to produce multiple cell types and, when transplanted into different tissues, they have the remarkable ability to recognize and respond to a myriad of tissue factors, to produce the right types and numbers of cells that respect tissue boundaries. “These surprising findings are turning cell biology upside down,” said Young. “They are providing the impetus for a transformation of medical therapeutics.”
Meet MBL Alumnus Wise Young
In the early 1970s, Wise Young spent two summers at the MBL while pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Iowa. He was a student in the 1972 Neurobiology Course and a Grass Fellow, under advisor Rodolfo Llinás, a year later.
Young was part of the team that fifteen years ago discovered and established high-dose methylprednisolone (MP) as the first effective therapy for spinal cord injuries. This overturned concepts that spinal cord injuries were permanent, refocused research, and opened new vistas of hope. He also developed the first standardized rat spinal cord injury model used worldwide for testing therapies, formed the first consortium funded by the National Institutes of Health to test promising therapies, and helped establish several widely accepted clinical outcome measures in spinal cord injury research.
More recently, Young has been involved with a new drug, 4-aminopyridine, or 4-AP, that improves the function of surviving nerve fibers in the spinal cord. “Most people with spinal cord injury still have some connections, but many have lost their myelin (an insulating material) and cannot conduct signals well,” said Young. “4-AP allows these demyelinated axons to send signals.” The drug is not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration and still needs to undergo pivotal trials, which may require one to two years to complete.
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