jump to

search

Twenty Second Annual Darwin College Lecture Series 2007

IDENTITY

Lecture 7   :   2 March

IMMUNOLOGICAL SELF

Philippa Marrack

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Denver, Colorado

Biography   |   Abstract  |   Printable Version  

Biography

Philippa Marrack took her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at New Hall, Cambridge. For her Ph.D. she worked with Dr. Alan Munro in the Department of Biochemistry and at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology on Hills Road. In 1971 she left the UK for the University of California at San Diego, where she did postdoctoral work with Dr. Richard Dutton. Since then she has worked at the University of Rochester in upstate New York and at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, Colorado. She is currently an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor at National Jewish and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Because of a lucky break and persuasion by Dr. Munro, in 1967 Dr. Marrack began to work on T cells, crucial cells of the immune system which had been discovered independently by Drs. Miller and Good only a few years earlier. In collaboration with her husband, Dr. John Kappler, Dr. Marrack discovered how T cells act to help other cells reject infections and found out how T cells distinguish between invading organisms and their own host. These investigators also showed that some bacteria and viruses are particularly damaging because they produce powerful stimulants of the immune system which, paradoxically, kill rather than protect their hosts. Recently Dr. Marrack has been studying adjuvants, crucial components of human and animal vaccines. Dr. Marrack is a member of the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences, USA. She has received many awards including the Royal Society Wellcome Foundation Prize, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize-Columbia University, the Rabbi Shai Shackner Prize-University of Jerusalem, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Immunologists and the L'Oreal UNESCO Women in Science Award.

The lectures are given at 5.30 p.m. in The Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, with an adjacent overflow theatre with live TV coverage. Each lecture is typically attended by 600 people so you must arrive early to ensure a place.