| B. R. Baker Memorial Lecture | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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THE THIRTY-FOURTH ANNUAL Delivered by
Professor Robert Stroud 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.
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