May 16, 2002
First Russell Ross Lecture next Friday
The first Russell Ross Endowed Lecture, presented by the Department of Pathology, will be given next Friday.
The lecture is dedicated to the memory and scientific legacy of Dr. Russell Ross, professor and chair of the School of Medicine’s pathology department from 1982 to 1994 and an active member of the department from 1965 until his sudden death in 1999. Ross was also associate dean for scientific affairs in the School of Medicine from 1971 to 1978 and director of the Center for Vascular Biology from 1990 until his death. He earned his Ph.D. in experimental pathology from the UW in 1962.
Among his significant contributions to vascular biology, he is best known for the “response-to-injury” hypothesis about the development of atherosclerosis, which he and Dr. John Glomset, professor of biochemistry and medicine, published in 1973. Much current research is based on this theory that initial and continued damage to the artery walls results in a chronic inflammatory process that ultimately leads to thickening of artery walls and plaque formation.
For more than 25 years, Ross had collaborated with Elaine Raines, research professor of pathology, who now chairs the Ross Endowed Lecture Committee.
For this first Ross Endowed Lecture, the speaker will be Dr. Richard Hynes, Daniel K. Ludwig professor for cancer research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator there.
He will speak on “Cell Adhesion in the Vasculature” at 11 a.m., Friday, May 24, in room D-209 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is open to everyone.
Hynes’ work has focused on cell adhesion, or the ways cells attach themselves to body tissues, and has provided many important insights into the molecular basis of cell adhesion and its consequences.
His laboratory seeks to understand, at the molecular level, the proteins involved in cell adhesion and the ways in which they control adhesion and migration of cells in both normal and pathological processes.
Some of the first knockout mice (mice bred with certain missing genes) lacking cell adhesion molecules were generated in his laboratory, and investigations with them have revealed much about the roles of cell adhesion molecules in development, inflammation, hemostasis, angiogenesis (blood vessel growth) and cancer.
Hynes is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, a member of the Institute of Medicine, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to serving on the advisory boards of several research institutes, Hynes was president of the American Society for Cell Biology in 2000.
