Inaugural symposium on Jan. 17 features top scientists

Princeton NJ -- Some of the world's top scientists in biology and medicine will gather Friday, Jan. 17, for a symposium to mark the opening of the Carl Icahn Laboratory and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

The symposium, "Genomics: Connecting Basic Biology to Disease," will take place in McDonnell Auditorium. It will start with opening remarks by President Tilghman, who was the institute's founding director, at 8:30 a.m. and will conclude at 5 p.m. with closing remarks by incoming institute director David Botstein. (For more information and registration, see http://www.genomics.princeton.edu/ asp/symposia.asp?id=34.)

"My goal was to illustrate the extent to which this new kind of biology has application to disease," said Botstein, who will come to Princeton in July from Stanford University, where he is on the medical school faculty. "So what I have done is to invite the best people in these fields to come and tell us about their work with the idea that it would inform how genomics and quantitative biology are going to help us in understanding human disease."

Among the speakers are Lee Hartwell, who directs the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center of Seattle, Wash., and won the 2001 Nobel Prize in medicine; Eric Lander, a 1978 Princeton graduate who is the founder and director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.; and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in medicine with Princeton biologist Eric Wieschaus and is director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany.

Related article
Scientists map he future of genomics research in new lab