 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
The Ruth Sager Lecture in Genetics
 8/29/03 - 8:00 PM - Lillie Auditorium
"From Long-term Gradients to Local Cell Changes: How the Drosophila Embryo Controls its Morphogenesis"
Eric F. Weischaus, Princeton University, Department of Developmental Biology
Dr. Weischaus earned his bachelor's degree from Notre Dame University and his doctoral degree at Yale University. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1981 and was named Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology in 1993. In 1995, Dr. Weischaus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine with two other scientists for discovering genetic mechanisms in fruit flies that explain how birth defects and miscarriages occur in humans.
 About the Sager Lecture
Dr. Ruth Sager was chief of cancer genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a professor at Harvard Medical School where she was an acknowledged expert on supressor genes and their relation to breast cancer. Dr. Sager was the author of more than 200 scientific papers on cancer genetics and the existence of DNA outside of cell nuclei, her first field of research, which she pursued through the study of algae. In 1988, Dr. Sager received the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal in phycology. This medal is awarded every three years in recognition of excellence in published research on marine or freshwater algae. After switching her field of study to breast cancer in 1972, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and studied the disease for a year at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory in London, England. Dr. Sager graduated from the University of Chicago. She earned a master's degree at Rutgers University and a doctorate at Columbia University. Dr. Sager was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1977.
She was a professor at Hunter College until 1975, when she joined Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her cancer research involved the identification of more than 40 possible tumor supressor genes with implications in the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.
She also proved "by persistent counterexample, where originality leads," according to the University of Chicago Magazine article, published in 1994 when she was named alumna of the year.
Dr. Sager died of cancer in March, 1997, at the age of 79.
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
