The 22nd Annual Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Raymond Schofield, Ph.D., scientist-in-residence and honorary lecturer, formerly the Paterson Laboratories, the Christie Hospital, and the Holt Radium Institute, The Concept of a Stem Cell Niche, a Proposal Emerging from Work on Hematopoietic Stem Cells (Presented by Titia de Lange)

Judith Kimble, Ph.D., Vilas Professor, Vannevar Bush Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison; investigator emeritus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Discovery of a Stem Cell Niche and Its Molecular Regulation of Stem Cells and Differentiation

Allan Spradling, Ph.D., director emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, How Niches Regulate Germline and Somatic Stem Cells

Speaker bio(s)

The Wiley Prize lectures will take place in Caspary Auditorium and will be available on the Wiley Prize website a few days after the event.

Raymond Schofield left Oldham High School and full-time education at the age of 16 in 1941, during the middle of WW2, and after a prolonged economic depression. He took a job as a student technician in the laboratory of the local hospital. In 1952, he moved to the Radiobiology Research Lab at the Christie Hospital in Manchester. In addition to obtaining diplomas in medical laboratory technology, he launched into part-time study, much of it self-study, towards a BSc in chemistry and human physiology as an external student at London University, and in 1956 was awarded the degree. At this time, Schofield was involved in studies of the effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy on the bone marrow, and in bone marrow transplantation.

From 1964 to 1965, he was Scientist-in-Residence at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco. It was during this year that Schofield developed a serious interest in the identity of the bone marrow stem cell, initially producing evidence that the putative stem cell recognized at that time was not, indeed, the real stem cell. Much of the work involved in this was submitted as a thesis for a PhD in 1969, and was accepted, somewhat reluctantly, by skeptical examiners. Thereafter, he was appointed as honorary lecturer at Manchester Medical School, as a joint organizer of a course in experimental pathology. The course was made available to medical students as an intercalated BSc course after the end of their second year. In 1977, he presented the paper proposing the hypothesis of the stem cell 'niche' at a symposium at the University of California, in San Francisco. It was published in the journal Blood Cells in 1978. It appeared to arouse little interest except from opponents of the concept. It has now been cited over 3,400 times in the literature! In 1985, Schofield 'retired' and became a farmer in Wales, mainly breeding sheep, for the next several years.

Judith Kimble is Vilas Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Biochemistry and Investigator Emeritus at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, after 25 years as an HHMI Investigator.  She received her Ph. D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1978, was a postdoc at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge UK, and joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1983. 

Kimble is best known for her pioneering identification of a stem cell niche followed by analyses of the genes, molecules, pathways and regulatory networks that allow the niche to regulate stem cells and differentiation. She was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2002. She has served the biomedical research community in numerous capacities, including President of the Society of Developmental Biology, President of the Genetics Society of America and Chair of the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science.

Allan Spradling received a B.A. degree in physics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in cell biology at MIT in 1975.  Following postdoctoral studies at MIT and Indiana University, he joined the Department of Embryology faculty of the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore in 1980.  In 1988 he became an HHMI Investigator and served as department Director from 1994-2016.  Spradling is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1989), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991) and the American Philosophical Society (2016). 

Spradling is best known for his work with Gerry Rubin, developing transposable elements as gene transfer vectors, leading to the first correction of a genetic defect in a metazoan (1982). He founded the Drosophila Gene Disruption project (GDP) that over 25 years has generated and freely shared strains allowing genetic access to most fly genes.  Throughout his career, Spradling's group has studied the process of oocyte development in both Drosophila and mice, revealing the unexpected conservation of germline cysts and nurse cells. The Spradling lab used lineage methods to identify stem cells in the ovary and gut, and characterized the importance of stem cell regulation in maintaining tissues and allowing them to adapt to changing needs.

Open to

Tri-Institutional