University of Chicago lecture series to highlight cancer and hormones

January 7, 2003

Learn how hormones affect cancer growth in a new series of free public lectures at the University of Chicago beginning Saturday, Jan. 18, 2003. Discover how hormones interact with cancer cells at the level of individual protein molecules and look at 3-D images of these proteins as they act as molecular machines that control the growth or death of a cell. The lectures also will explain some of the biochemical details of how a cell repairs damaged DNA or dies if the damage is too great.

This series of eight lectures, titled "Cancer and Hormones," will be held Saturday mornings from 11 a.m. to noon from Jan. 18 through March 8 in Room 106 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center at 5720 S. Ellis Ave. Kendall Nettles, senior graduate student in the Committee on Cancer Biology at the University of Chicago, will deliver the lectures. Kendall earned a bachelor's degree from Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., and currently is conducting research for his dissertation in the laboratory of biochemist and molecular biologist Geoffrey Greene, Ph.D., in the university's Ben May Institute for Cancer Research.

This is the inaugural lecture series of what is planned to be an annual series. The lectures are named for Charles B. Huggins, M.D., the first director of the Ben May Institute who was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work published in 1941 showing that deprivation of testosterone can halt prostate cancer.

The lectures are intended to make science accessible to a general audience and to convey the excitement of new discoveries in the biological sciences. All of the lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, call (773) 834-3899.