John Exton, MD, PhD, the author of Crucible of Science — a book detailing the history of a unique laboratory at Washington University and of Carl and Gerty Cori, the tremendous biochemists who established it — will make opening remarks at the Carl and Gerty Cori Lecture May 8.
Exton is a professor of molecular physiology and biophysics at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
His book tells the history of the Coris, winners of the Nobel Prize in 1947, and of the laboratory, which has produced some of the top scientists in the U.S., including six other Nobel Prize winners: Severo Ochoa and Arthur Kornberg in 1959; Luis Leloir in 1970; Earl Sutherland in 1971; Christian de Duve in 1974; and Edwin Krebs in 1992.
Exton will speak at 3:30 p.m. in the Eric P. Newman Education Center first-floor auditorium on the Medical Campus.
The Cori Lecture will follow at 4 p.m. with speaker James A. Spudich, the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Biochemistry and of Cardiovascular Disease at Stanford University. Spudich’s talk is titled “The Underlying Molecular Basis of Human Hypertrophic and Dilated Cardiomyopathies.”
The event is free and open to the public.