Nobel Prize scientist opens lecture Series

Professor Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, Director of the Genetic Department at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology at Tubingen, launched the King’s International Lecture series this week.

Professor Nusslein-Volhard, who was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995 for her work on the genes controlling development in the fruit fly, gave a fascinating presentation on her recent work studying Zebrafish.

Hosted at King’s, part of King’s Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre, the lecture, titled ‘The development of colour pattern in fishes: towards an understanding of the evolution of beauty’, offered an exploration of the origins of zebrafish colour patterns during development.

Professor Shitij Kapur, Dean of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s, opened the lecture. He said: ‘We are delighted to welcome Professor Nusslein-Volhard to King’s to kick off our International Lecture Series. Without her pioneering work we would have very little knowledge of the genes important in early animal development, knowledge which is essential not only to developmental biology but to advancing our understanding of the causes of human disease and birth defects.

‘This new Lecture Series marks a celebration of the formation of King’s Health Partners more than two years ago, by bringing world-renowned scientists here to King’s to talk about ground-breaking research and discoveries.’

About the lecture series

A major focus of King’s Health Partners is on ‘translational research’: enabling research discoveries to be effectively converted or translated into new treatments for patients as quickly as possible – and ensuring that the outcomes for patients feed back into further research and into the education of future clinicians and researchers.

Basic science and discovery is stage one of the translational research ‘lifecycle’. The lectures in this series will celebrate such scientific advances including protein folding, the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein, and deciphering of the structure of eukaryotic genes.

This first lecture (alongside others focusing on basic science in the Series) is dedicated to Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958) the biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA. Franklin joined King’s in 1951 and she is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA undertaken at the College which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.

The Rosalind Franklin lectures (as part of the International Lecture Series) have been organised by the King’s Biosciences Institute, which has been created by Professor Mike Malim and colleagues to integrate basic science with translational endeavours across King’s Health Partners. These lectures are a key element of this aspiration.

All staff, students and members of the public are welcome to attend any of the lectures. on the programme, see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/health/events/intlectures/index.aspx