University of Chicago lecture series to highlight skin cancer

University of Chicago lecture series to highlight skin cancer

December 15, 2003

Learn how tumors develop using skin cancer as a model in a new series of free public lectures at the University of Chicago beginning Saturday, Jan. 17, 2004. Discover the various events that lead to tumor formation using the biology of the skin. The skin is the largest organ in the human body and has distinctive self-renewal capacity, which provides an ideal model for explaining human carcinogenesis. The lectures will also review essential aspects of cancer biology, describe principles of environmental toxins and heredity in cancer, unravel novel technologies that enable us to analyze and manipulate genes and proteins, and discuss new treatments targeted to properties of cancer cells.

This series of eight lectures, titled "Getting Under the Skin of Cancer Development," will be held Saturday mornings from 11 a.m. to noon from Jan. 17 through March 13 in Room 106 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center at 5720 S. Ellis Ave. University of Chicago dermatology resident Mario Lacouture, M.D., will deliver the lectures. Prior to coming to Chicago, Lacouture earned his medical degree from Javeriana University in Bogata, Columbia, and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School-Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass.

This is the second annual lecture series, which is intended to make science accessible to a general audience and to convey the excitement of new discoveries in the biological sciences. 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.

All of the lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, call (773) 834-3899.