Dr. Alfred G. Gilman, a 1994 Nobel Prize laureate and a Yale College alumnus, will deliver the Farr Lecture at the School of Medicine's 12th Annual Student Research Day, on Tuesday, May 12.
Gilman's lecture will top a day of activities that will begin at noon, when more than 60 Yale medical students and five public health students will present the results of their original research findings in scientific posters. These will feature such topics as disclosure of HIV/AIDS diagnosis to children born of HIV-infected mothers; the in-formed consent process in elderly patients who have developed delirium; treatment of elderly patients with acute myocardial infractions; identification of novel ion channels in the mammalian brain; power and mysticism in the introduction of anesthesia in 19th-century America; medical conditions and autism; and motherhood and medicine: a study of women from Yale School of Medicine, 1922-1999.
Five students whose theses were selected for special honors by the Thesis Awards Committee will give oral presentations of their works at 2 p.m. These students and their research projects are: Alan Cheng, immunology, "JAK3 and the Pathogenesis of Severe Combined Immunodeficiency: Insights into Structure and Function"; John Forman, pathology, "Recombinant Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Expressing HIV-1 Gag and Env Genes Generate HIV-like Particles and Elicit Anti-HIV Immune Response in Mice"; Jeffrey Reynolds, internal medicine, "Phenotypic Expression of Glucocorticoid-Remediable Aldosteronism in a Large Kindred"; Nicole Ullrich (who also earned a Ph.D. at the School of Medicine in 1997), neurobiology, "Properties and Function of Chloride Channels in Human Glial Tumor"; and Nirit Weiss, pediatrics, "Mechanisms of Hypoxia Che-motransduction in Glomus Cells of the Intact Rat Carotid Body, In Vitro."
The events are open to the University community. All presentations will take place in Rm. 110 of the Jane Ellen Hope Building, 315 Cedar St.
Gilman will chair the sessions that precede the Farr Lecture, which he will present at 4:30 p.m. The annual lectureship honors Dr. Lee E. Farr, a 1932 medical school graduate who died last July. Medical School Dean David A. Kessler will introduce Gilman, who will speak on "G Proteins and Regulation of Adenylyl Cyclase."
A New Haven native who received a B.S. in biochemistry from Yale in 1962, Gilman received the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for the discovery, characterization and purification of guanine nucleotide-binding regulatory proteins (G proteins). His observations provided a firm molecular basis for understanding certain signal transduction processes present throughout nature. He edited the best known textbook of pharmacology: Goodman and Gilman's "The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics." He has chaired the department of pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas since 1981, and three years ago was named a Regental Professor there.
Yale is the only medical school to require a dissertation based on original research for the M.D. degree, according to Dr. John N. Forrest Jr., professor of medicine and director of the Office of Student Research. The thesis, an essential part of the Yale system of medical education, is designed to develop critical judgment, habits of scholarship and self-education, and application of the scientific method to medicine. Required since 1839, the thesis gives students the opportunity to work closely with faculty who are distinguished scientists, clinicians and scholars, explains Forrest.
Most students begin working on their theses between their first and second years of medical school, identifying a topic and selecting a faculty adviser. Students continue to conduct research throughout their four or five years of medical school, working in laboratories at Yale or other institutions. Approximately 25 percent of Yale students spend a fifth year pursuing research interests, Forrest notes.
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