B. R. Baker Memorial Lecture


The University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
Presents

THE THIRTY-FOURTH ANNUAL
B. R. BAKER LECTURE

Delivered by

Professor Robert Stroud
University of California, San Francisco

"Regulating Ammonia and Water Transport Across Membranes; QED!"
Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 4:00 p.m.
1001 Engineering Science Building

Growing up in England Stroud, obtained his bachelors degree (B.A., M.A) from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from the University of London where he made early applications of non-centrosymmetric direct methods in crystallography. Throughout his career Stroud has devised imaginative approaches to investigate problems in biochemistry at the level of atomic structure and mechanism. His postdoctoral was with Richard Dickerson at Caltech where he determined the first structures for trypsin and trypsinogen. He became Assistant and Associate Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 1977 he joined the UCSF faculty where he is Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry (http://msg.ucsf.edu/stroud/index.html). He is the director of the multi Institutions Centers for Structures of Membrane Proteins (csmp.ucsf.edu), and director of the Membrane Protein Expression Center (mpec.ucsf.edu).

His focus in the Baker lecture is on understanding how transmembrane proteins function at the level of the atomic basis for their selectivity and mechanisms. Stroud and his group have published over 250 publications. In 2007 he coordinated the book 'Computational and Structural Approaches to Drug Discovery: Ligand-Protein Interactions' by Robert M. Stroud (Editor), Janet Finer-Moore (Editor) published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK). He is this year's winner of the Hans Neurath award of the Protein Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (United Kingdom). He was president of the Biophysical Society of the United States, 1986-1987, and a founding fellow of the society in 2000. He was the DeWitt Stetten Lecturer of the National Institutes of Health (1984). From 1993-2003 he was the editor of the Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure. He is currently chair of the scientific advisory board of the Saint Jude Children's Cancer Research Hospital, Memphis (2002-), and serves on the scientific advisory boards of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), and ASTEX Pharmaceuticals (UK, 2000- ).


Professor B.R. Baker was a Professor of Chemistry at UCSB from 1966 until his death in 1971. Baker's graduate work on the structural elucidation and synthesis of Cannabis constituents marked the beginning of a prolific career in the chemistry of natural products. He undertook many diverse projects of medicinal interest including the synthesis of antihemorrhagic vitamin K analogues, biotin derivatives, compounds with hormone activity, sulfones with activity against tuberculosis, and alkaloids. He published two books and more than 370 papers that included a series of papers on the structure and synthesis of the antimalarial alkaloid from Hydrangea that filled an entire issue of the Journal of Organic Chemistry in 1952. He determined the structure of the first known nucleoside antibiotic, puromycin, and synthesized it in 1955. This achievement came long before the discovery of the structure of transfer ribonucleic acid (tRNA). Puromycin was later shown to mimic the structure of tRNA and became and an important tool of research in molecular biology. Puromycin was too toxic for cancer chemotherapy, but it aroused Bill's interest in this field. Few of the myriad of compounds that he had so meticulously synthesized showed any antitumor activity in vivo, so he sought a more rational approach to cancer chemotherapy. Perhaps his greatest contribution to medicinal chemistry was the concept of active-site-directed irreversible enzyme inhibition of substrate-identical enzymes. A monograph summarizing this approach to drug design promptly became on of the classic works in the field.

Past lecturers:

Year Presenter Institution   Year Presenter Institution
2007 Vern Schramm Yeshiva Univ.   1990 Sir James W. Black Kings College
2006 Paul J. Reider Amgen   1989 E.J. Corey Harvard
2005 Ronald Breslow Columbia Univ.   1988 Richard Lerner Scripps Found.
2004 T.C. Bruice UCSB   1987 Harry B. Gray Cal Tech
2003 Jack Dixon UCSD   1986 Alan R. Fersht Imperial College
2002 Gregory Petsko Brandeis Univ.   1985 Stephen Benkovic Penn State
2001 Steven Benner Florida Univ.   1984 Christopher Walsh Harvard Med.
2000 Joanne Stubbe MIT   1983    
1999 Richard E. Dickerson UCLA   1982 Daniel Santi UC San Francisco
1998 Harold A. Sheraga Cornell Univ.   1981 Carl Djerassi Stanford Univ.
1997 Daniel E. Koshland Berkeley   1980 Linus Pauling
1996 David S. Sigman UCLA   1979 Bruce N. Ames Berkeley
1995 Chi-Huey Wong Scripps Inst.   1978 Jeremy Knowles Harvard Univ.
1994 Richard Holm Harvard Univ.   1977    
1993 Olke C. Uhlenbeck Colorado Univ.   1976 Nelson Leonard Illinois Univ.
1992 Peter B. Dervan CAL Tech   1975 Joseph Bertino Yale Univ.
1991 Peter G. Schultz Berkeley   1975 Paul Berg Stanford Univ.

 



Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry 9510
University of California
Santa Barbara CA 93106 - 9510
Department Phone: 805-893-5675
Department Fax: 805-893-4120