Key Note Lecture
Wednesday, April 1 • 4:00 p.m.
"M" Building • Room G011
Proteins that Nature Never Made
Macromolecular chemistry has traditionally been divided into two fields, with biochemists and biochemical engineers working on proteins and nucleic acids while polymer chemists and materials scientists have concerned themselves with synthetic polymers. These two classes of macromolecules have profound differences: proteins and nucleic acids are uniform, well-folded, and evolvable, whereas polymers are heterogeneous and tend to adopt random-coil conformations. These differences in molecular structure and behavior have led to striking differences in how natural and synthetic polymers are used – largely for information storage and transfer in biology, and largely as materials in the technological world. This lecture will describe an ongoing attempt to bridge the gap between polymers and proteins by using artificial genes to direct the synthesis of artificial proteins in bacterial cells and to combine the physical and informational properties of macromolecules.
Additional Lecture for ChBE Grad Students & Faculty
Thursday, April 2 • 11:00 a.m.
Ford ES&T • Room L1255
Reinterpreting the Genetic Code:
Non-Canonical Amino Acids in Protein
Design, Evolution, and Analysis
The genetic code, elucidated in the 1960s through the work of Nirenberg, Ochoa, Khorana and their coworkers, provides a set of molecular instructions for translating nucleic acids into proteins. Codons are assigned to amino acids through high-fidelity charging of transfer RNAs and through accurate base-pairing between charged tRNAs and messenger RNA. Over the last decade, cells have been outfitted with modified translational machinery that enables the participation of an expanded set of amino acids in protein synthesis. These developments have stimulated a unified view of the chemistry of natural and synthetic macromolecules and have provided a basis for powerful new approaches to protein design, protein evolution, biological imaging, and proteome-wide analysis of cellular processes.
David A. Tirrell
David A. Tirrell is the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor and Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. After earning the B.S. in Chemistry at MIT, Dr. Tirrell enrolled in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, where he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1978 for work done under the supervision of Otto Vogl. After a brief stay with Takeo Saegusa at Kyoto University, Dr. Tirrell accepted an assistant professorship in the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie-Mellon University in the fall of 1978.
Dr. Tirrell returned to Amherst in 1984 and served as Director of the Materials Research Laboratory before moving to Caltech in 1998. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland, at the Institut Charles Sadron in Strasbourg, at the University of Wisconsin, and at the Institut Curie in Paris. He was Editor of the Journal of Polymer Science from 1988 until 1999, and has chaired the Gordon Research Conferences on Polymers in Biosystems and on Chemistry of Supramolecules and Assemblies.
Dr. Tirrell's contributions to macromolecular chemistry have been recognized by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He has been awarded the Arthur C. Cope Scholar, Carl Marvel, Harrison Howe, S. C. Lind and Madison Marshall Awards of the American Chemical Society, as well as the American Chemical Society Award in Polymer Chemistry. He holds the Chancellor's Medal of the University of Massachusetts, the G. N. Lewis Medal of the University of California, Berkeley, and the degree of Doctor honoris causa from the Technical University of Eindhoven.
(Visit Dr. Dr. Tirrell's web site for additional information about his research.) |
About the Ashton Cary Lecture
 The Cary Lecture Series in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering was established in 1984 as a memorial to Ashton Hall Cary, a chemical engineering graduate of Georgia Tech, Class of 1943. Mr. Cary served in the U.S. Army after graduation and later built a career in Georgia’s textile industry. He was a native of LaGrange, Georgia, where he was prominent in local politics and business and active in many charitable and civic organizations. At the time of his death in 1983, Mr. Cary was a production consultant for Kleen-Tex Industries.
The Cary Lecture Series was initiated with a gift from Dr. Freeman Cary, who also studied chemical engineering at Tech. Dr. Cary, who is Ashton’s brother, received his M.D. from Emory University in 1950 and later became the attending physician for the U.S. Congress.The Cary Lectureship Fund is used to sponsor a lecture series by distinguished scholars in fields of significance to chemical engineering. The visiting lecturers, in addition to presenting seminars on recent engineering advances, participate in informal discussions with Georgia Tech faculty and students.
The Cary Family
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Bruce C. Gates, 2008
Nathan S. Lewis, 2007
Julia S. Higgins, 2006
Gregory Stephanopoulos, 2004
Richard M. Gross, 2003
Ignacio E. Grossman, 2002
Eric W. Kaler, 2001
Daniel I. C. Wang, 2000
John M. Prausnitz, 1999
Pablo G. Debenedetti, 1998
Donald R. Paul, 1997
Joseph A. Miller, Jr., 1996
Gregory J. McRae, 1995
Stanley I. Sandler, 1994
L. Louis Hegedus, 1993
Matthew Tirrell, 1992
Robert S. Langer, 1991
Manfred Morari, 1990
C. Judson King, 1989
Octave Levenspiel, 1988
Giovanni Astarita, 1987
Edward E. David, Jr., 1986
Ilya Prigogine, 1985
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