Nobel Prize winner is inaugural G. Lombard Kelly Lecturer

Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Andrew Fire, George D. Smith Professor in Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford University, is the inaugural G. Lombard Kelly Lecturer for the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

Fire will discuss Opportunistic RNAs and Acquisitive Genomes at noon, Thursday, March 16 in Room GB 1210 of the J. Harold Harrison, M.D., Education Commons. A reception will follow in the lobby.

In 2006, Fire shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Craig Mello, a biologist and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, for their discovery of RNA interference, or how tiny snippets of double-stranded ribonucleic acid can effectively shut down specific genes.

Fire’s current research studies the mechanisms by which cells and organisms respond to genetic change. He is a member of Stanford’s Child Health Research Institute, Cancer Institute and Bio-X, Stanford’s interdisciplinary biosciences institute, which brings together biomedical and life science researchers, clinicians, engineers, physicists and computational scientists to come up with interdisciplinary solutions and create new knowledge to benefit human health.

The lectureship, which is overseen by graduate students in the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy, is named for Kelly, an Augusta native and 1924 MCG graduate, who later chaired the department, became dean of the medical school and eventually MCG’s first president. As dean, Kelly helped develop a master plan that included the development of a state-owned and controlled teaching hospital, the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Hospital. Construction on the hospital began one month after his retirement in 1953.