Prion Biology and Diseases

Speaker:

Stanley Prusiner, M.D.

02 Apr 2007

4:15 PM

1210 LeBaron Hall

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Stanley Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1997 for his discovery of prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing agents composed of protein believed to cause such brain diseases as Mad Cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Prusiner, who was born and spent much of his childhood in Des Moines, is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He received both his degree in Chemistry and his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Prusiner worked for several years at the National Institutes of Health before completing his residency and joining the faculty at UCSF. His many awards and honors include the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and prizes from the American Academy of Neurology, the NIH, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Fairdner Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement in Medical Science.

This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.