Clark University - Clark News Fall 2002
In Closing (fall 2002)
The human genome in context
Robert Kamen, a leading molecular biologist specializing in genomics, delivered the keynote address, "Fifty Years from DNA to the Human Genome," at Fall Convocation ceremonies on Aug. 28.
Kamen is the recently retired president of Abbott Bioresearch Center in Worcester and also played a leadership role in the establishment of Genetics Institute, Inc., a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass., now owned by Wyeth. Throughout his career, Kamen has helped develop many drugs that target specific diseases.
In his talk, Kamen placed this year's summer reading, Matt Ridley's "Genome," in the context of science for the 21st century. He focused on how mapping the human genome is impacting drug development, but started with the following brief history of the discovery of DNA.
I called my talk today "Fifty Years from DNA to the Human Genome," for lack of any other ideas for a title. It's actually a bit premature. A very important milestone in the history of biology occurred on April 25, 1953, that's actually 49 years ago, when Jim Watson and Francis Crick, two quirky, rather eccentric geniuses who never achieved anything in their lives—also they'd really never done any experiments—these two characters published a 900-word letter in the Journal Nature…And in this letter they proposed the double helical model for the structure of DNA, the chemical structure that makes up our genes…
Next spring, about 50 years to the day after the publication of the Watson and Crick landmark paper, the human genome project will publish a complete and detailed description of the entire human genome, including all 30,000 to 35,000 genes and the order of some 3 billion letters, or nucleotides, that code them. The realization of this milestone after half a century of research is an achievement that marks also the first steps in a growing moleculo-biological understanding of virtually all aspects of living systems in chemical terms, and this will provide the basis for what I believe will be a complete chemical understanding of living systems within the next century.
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Clarknews Fall 2002
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Convocation Speaker Robert Kamen
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