Last week in Washington, D.C., Vincent Astor Professor Paul Greengard received the Metropolitan Life Foundation's Award for Medical Research, a prize that includes a $200,000 research grant to RU as well as a $50,000 personal award. The $50,000 won't be going into Greengard's bank account, however. At the Met Life ceremony on Jan. 25, Greengard announced that he and his wife, Ursula von Rydingsvard, are donating the entire amount, plus a personal matching gift of $50,000, to create the Pearl Meister Distinguished Lecture Series. Gifts to supplement Greengard's commitment were provided by the Zachary and Elizabeth M. Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Research Foundation and F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. Together with Greengard's support and other funding, these grants provide the $200,000 needed to endow the lectureship in perpetuity.
|
Vincent Astor Professor Paul Greengard (right) received the Metropolitan Life Foundation's Award for Medical Research on Jan. 25. He is donating his $50,000 personal award, plus a matching amount, to create a lecture series to honor his mother, Pearl Meister. |
This new annual series, which will bring outstanding women scientists to the RU campus, is a memorial for Greengard's mother. "In her day, women didn't have many opportunities," Greengard says, "and this seemed like a meaningful way to honor her."
"I'm delighted that Paul Greengard, along with other donors, has made it possible to bring exceptional women scientists to campus for the Pearl Meister Distinguished Lecture Series," says Rockefeller President Arnold J. Levine.
Greengard, director of the Zachary and Elizabeth M. Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research and head of RU's Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, received the Met Life Foundation award for his work on Alzheimer's disease. "In honoring and giving support to talented, creative scientists on the front lines of this battle, Met Life intends that the Awards for Medical Research serve as the catalyst to nurture the creative spirit of scientific investigation and discovery," said Robert H. Benmosche, chairman and CEO of Met Life.
Greengard was one of the first to offer physiological evidence that estrogen therapy may prevent the onset of Alzheimer's. The disease is characterized by the buildup of plaques, primarily made up of beta-amyloid proteins, in the brain. The plaques appear in all cases of Alzheimer's, although scientists do not yet fully understand the role of these plaques in the pathology of the disease. The beta-amyloid proteins are made in most organs of all normal and Alzheimer-stricken individuals. However, the protein selectively accumulates in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, so the plaques are probably a key to the disease. Greengard's research group found that treatment of animal or human nerve cells with estrogen greatly reduces the amount of beta-amyloid made by those cells. The discovery provides the first molecular evidence of why estrogen replacement therapy offers post-menopausal women some protection from Alzheimer's.
Greengard's lab has also been looking at protein phosphorylation, the process by which a phosphate molecule is either added to or removed from a protein. They have shown that phosphorylation-related changes are important elements in regulating the extent to which amyloid precursor protein is converted into the beta-amyloid protein. They have been able to greatly reduce beta-amyloid formation through this approach as well.
Another topic of investigation in the Greengard lab is synapsins, a family of neuron-specific phosphoproteins that Greengard discovered nearly 25 years ago. His lab has demonstrated that synapsins regulate the formation of new synapses, the junctions between two nerve cells. Since the degeneration of neurons and a loss of synapses characterize Alzheimer's, this work provides the basis of new approaches for treating or delaying the onset of the disease.
Greengard has won a number of honors in addition to the Metropolitan Life Foundation Award, including the National Academy of Sciences Award in the Neurosciences, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize, from the Society for Neuroscience, the Lieber Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Schizophrenia Research from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression and a Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in Health. Most recently, he received the 1998 Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar Award.
A Conversation with Paul Greengard
News&Notes turns the tables on a brain researcher and
asks how scientists think
Like everybody who goes into a new field, Vincent Astor Professor Paul Greengard started out doing something else. He studied math and theoretical physics as an undergraduate, but in those post-World War II days, the career options for physicists seemed limited to atomic research.
"I didn't want to use whatever talents I might have to making better bombs," he said. Instead, a conversation with his roommate's physician parents led him to the emerging field of biophysics. He found the idea of studying the nervous system fascinating and went to Johns Hopkins University for a Ph.D. in biophysics.
Greengard has studied the brain for most of his career, making important contributions to the study of schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. News&Notes asked him recently if his studies of the brain give him any insight into the creative process of scientific discovery.
"I have thought a lot about that intriguing question," Greengard says. "I think that what goes on is that the brain processes different bits of information and makes connections between them at a pre-conscious, rather than at a conscious, level. Sometimes you'll make some observation, and only later will you realize that a relationship exists between that observation and some other fact or facts, all without thinking about the subject."
"Occasionally," he adds, "I'll read interviews with scientists who've made some important discovery and they're asked 'How did you think of that?' No one ever seems to know. A typical response would be 'the idea just occurred to me sitting in the car waiting for my family to come out of the supermarket.'"
Greengard has a lot of opportunity to think about the creative process in his own domestic life. His wife is the noted sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, who creates large, semiabstract sculptures in cedar that are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum and other places. Greengard notes that she works with a broad general idea of what she's going to end up with, but is inspired to change directions as she goes along. His appreciation for different modes of thinking and his willingness to look at things anew carry over into his laboratory at RU.
"I have some extremely talented younger colleagues," Greengard says. "Sometimes they'll come up with ideas that I don't think will work, but if they're still eager to do the experiments, I'll let them, because so many discoveries get made by not following conventional thinking."