Category: News

NIH Director Francis Collins recently named Larry Tabak as the NIH principal deputy director. Raynard Kington previously held this key position.

Over the years, I have worked closely with Dr. Tabak in many settings, including the Enhancing Peer Review initiative. A biochemist who continues to do research in the field of glycobiology, he is a firm supporter of investigator-initiated research and basic science. He is also a good listener and a creative problem solver.

Dr. Tabak, who has both D.D.S. and Ph.D. degrees, has directed NIH’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research for the past decade. In 2009, Dr. Kington—who had stepped in as acting director of NIH following the departure of Elias Zerhouni—tapped Dr. Tabak to be his acting deputy. Dr. Tabak’s achievements included playing an integral role in NIH Recovery Act activities.

Given the challenging issues that the principal deputy director often works on, Dr. Tabak’s experience—from dentist and bench scientist to scientific administrator—clearly provides him with valuable tools for the job. His experience as an endodontist may be particularly useful in some situations, allowing him to identify and “treat” potentially serious issues.

Congratulations to Carolyn Bertozzi!

We were delighted to learn that this longtime NIGMS grantee, current NIGMS Advisory Council member and former Stetten lecturer has been awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize  The prize honors technological invention and innovation.

Carolyn is a clear leader in chemical biology and glycobiology whose work extends from very basic studies of chemical reactivity through a variety of applications in biology. In addition, she is a committed teacher and mentor.

Please join me in congratulating her for this award in recognition of her many significant contributions.

Today marks the 1-year anniversary of our conversion of the NIGMS Feedback Loop from a thrice-yearly electronic newsletter into a blog. The year has passed quickly, but I think successfully.

Our inaugural post, Answering Your Recovery Act Questions, was the first of 16 entries related to the Recovery Act, and many of these led to extensive comments and replies. Throughout this extremely fast-paced period, the blog format served us all well: We provided you information in a timely fashion, and you helped us better understand what questions and concerns we needed to address.

The Feedback Loop has also covered many other topics. These are grouped into over 20 categories for easy browsing or searching. As of today, the site includes 86 posts by 28 NIGMS staff members.

During the last year, many people from the scientific community have told me how much they appreciate receiving information from us about NIGMS and NIH. The Feedback Loop is our major outlet for doing this, and we want make it as useful as possible to you and to us. Please don’t hesitate to comment on posts, e-mail me suggestions or other ideas or submit new post topics to the blog’s editor.

We once again received wonderful Nobel news today. We were delighted to learn that three long-time NIGMS grantees–Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath–will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry  for their “studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.”

Remarkably, at the same 1987 “Evolution of Catalytic Function” Cold Spring Harbor meeting where I first met Carol Greider, I heard Ada Yonath describe her initial attempts to crystallize and determine the structure of the ribosome. Tom Steitz also spoke about his exciting structure determination of DNA polymerase I, and Peter Moore talked about his work on the ribosome using specific deuterium labeling and neutron scattering methods developed in part with Venki Ramakrishnan. The meeting was filled with the promise that we would one day visualize and begin to understand this elaborate RNA-protein machine in atomic detail. More than a decade later, that promise was realized, as recognized by today’s announcement.

The Nobel committee has the daunting challenge of limiting itself to up to three laureates for each prize. Several other long-time NIGMS grantees who also contributed greatly to our understanding of the structure and function of the ribosome include Peter Moore, Harry Noller and Joachim Frank.

We were all very sad to learn of the death of Ruth Kirschstein, M.D., last evening. She will be deeply missed here at NIGMS, NIH, and beyond.

Dr. Kirschstein was an iconic figure at NIH and in the scientific community. She was the long-time director of NIGMS, serving from 1974 to 1993, and was the first female director of an NIH institute. She also served as acting director of NIH, deputy director of NIH, and in other key positions.

Dr. Kirschstein truly represented the best of NIH—public service, wisdom, and deep knowledge and analysis of important problems. She was so profoundly modest that Congress had to surprise her when they acknowledged her contributions and commitment to research training with the naming of the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards.

I am sure much more will be said and written about her in the future, and we will share this with you in the comments section. I encourage you to post your own thoughts about her as well.

We were delighted to learn this morning that long-time NIGMS grantees Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine   for their “discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.”

I remember very well the presentation by then-graduate student Carol Greider at the 1987 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology about her purification and initial characterization of telomerase and component RNA. Her passion and enthusiasm for science stood out, even in that high-powered crowd. I also enjoyed working with her when we were colleagues at Johns Hopkins before I came to NIGMS.

The work of Blackburn, Greider and Szostak represents an archetype of curiosity-driven basic research. The fact that DNA synthesis requires a template creates a clear challenge to copying the ends of DNA. The reality of this challenge was clear from Szostak’s studies with linear DNA molecules in yeast. Using a model organism (Tetrahymena) selected for its unusually high abundance of DNA ends, Blackburn’s lab identified telomere sequences and showed, with Szostak, that these sequences did, in fact, stabilize linear DNA molecules in yeast. Blackburn and Greider then set out to detect and purify the enzyme that adds telomeres to DNA.

After their success, they and many other researchers have explored the implications of these observations as they relate to cancer, cellular aging and stem cells. In the years to come, we can expect to see additional implications and broad exploitation of these observations.