The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Titia de Lange, Ph.D., Leon Hess Professor and head, Laboratory of Cell Biology and Genetics, The Rockefeller University

Speaker bio(s)

The protagonist of the TV series Breaking Bad, an underachieving Caltech-trained chemist called Walter White (a.k.a. Heisenberg), strains to hide his methamphetamine business and his psychopathic behavior from his wife, his DEA brother-in-law, and the Mexican drug cartel. The constant surveillance and threats drive Walt to many forms of deception, such as cooking crystal meth in an RV or inside tented homes undergoing fumigation, pretending to be a gambling addict, and stripping naked in a supermarket to fake amnesia.

 

Like Walter White, telomeres are at risk of being found out for what they really are: they are the ends of chromosomes. And for cells and organisms to survive, telomeres need to thwart surveillance by the DNA damage response signaling pathways that detect double-stranded breaks and single-stranded DNA lesions. In addition, telomeres need to deceive the DNA repair pathways that could ravage the genome if unleashed at chromosomes ends. Spoiler alert: how telomeres solve this end-protection problem is the subject of this Friday colloquium.

 

Dr. de Lange studied biochemistry at the University of Amsterdam and the Dutch Cancer Institute. As part of her undergraduate training, she worked on globin gene expression with Richard Flavell at the NIMR in Mill Hill before joining Piet Borst in 1981 at the Dutch Cancer Institute as a graduate student. In 1985, she obtained her Ph.D. (cum laude) and joined Harold Varmus at the University of California, San Francisco, for postdoctoral studies. With Dr. Varmus, she isolated human telomeric DNA and was the first to show that tumor telomeres shorten. In 1990, she was appointed assistant professor at The Rockefeller University, and was promoted to professor in 1997. She is currently the Leon Hess Professor, an American Cancer Society Research Professor and director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research at Rockefeller. Dr. de Lange is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the U.S. National Academy of Science, the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Society for Microbiology, the New York Academy of Science and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. de Lange was awarded the inaugural Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center Prize, the AACR’s G.H.A. Clowes Awards, the Vilcek Prize, the Vanderbilt Prize, the Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. She holds an honorary degree from the University of Utrecht. Dr. de Lange has served on the scientific advisory boards of many U.S. and European academic institutions, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the MIT Cancer Center, the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, the Cancer Research UK/London Research Institute and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Alena Powell

Phone

(212) 327-7745

Sponsor

Alena Powell
(212) 327-7745
apowell@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3375