Nobel Prize Winner Roger Kornberg Directing Summer Program in Life Sciences

Nobel Prize winner Prof. Roger Kornbeg of Stanford University is heading the Summer School in Life Sciences that opened today at the Institute for Advanced Studies on the Edmond J. Safra Campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The school will continue through Thursday August 5.

The school, which is now in its 18th year of operation, will deal this year with the subject of “Nuclear Receptors and Gene Regulation.” World leaders in the field of nuclear receptors will be among those lecturing in the course. Prof. Carl Djerassi of Stanford University, the inventor of the anti-conception pill, will give an overview of the chemical history of the pill.

Directing the course along with Prof. Kornberg are Prof. Yossi Orly of The Hebrew University, Prof. Yoav Sharoni of Ben-Gurion University and Prof. Haim Werner of Tel Aviv University.

Nuclear receptors are protein molecules that mediate hormonal action and are involved in multiple physiological and pathological processes. These receptors function as transcription factors capable of binding DNA and regulating gene expression in a highly orchestrated manner. Recent years have seen many drugs and other technologies being developed to modulate the action of nuclear receptors in cases of disease.

Prof. Kornberg won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 2006. He is a fellow in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University and has been a visiting professor at the university for the past 24 years. In 2001, he received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University.