Release date: April 13, 2005

Biochemist David Lynn to Examine 'Order Out Of Chaos' April 28

Contact:
Katherine Baust, 404-727-0642, katherine.baust@emory.edu

Emory University professor David Lynn, an internationally recognized researcher in biomolecular chemistry, molecular evolution and chemical biology, will discuss how spontaneous changes in human molecular structure can cause diseases, and what that means for new treatments, in his lecture, "From Alzheimer's Disease to Nanotechnology: Grabbing Order Out of Chaos." The lecture will be held at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, April 28 at the Miller Ward Alumni House, 815 Houston Mill Road, and is part of Emory's Great Teacher Lecture Series. The event is free and open to the public.

Lynn will explore how changes in the folding of protein molecules can lead to complications such as diabetes and cataracts, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's, as well as disorders that move between species, such as mad cow disease. "We might imagine that these flaws in the stacking of our basic building blocks could cause our crumbling demise. However, we will see how these diseases do not arise from the absence of molecular order, but rather from a self-assembly into different, more remarkable and at times toxic-ordered arrays," says Lynn.

The spontaneous formations of these new arrays are extremely common, and may play important roles in human disease and in understanding life, Lynn says. "Such knowledge offers tremendous promise for discoveries in fields as diverse as drug design and genome engineering, pathogenesis and genome evolution, functional nanoscale materials and even the origins of living systems," he says.

Lynn is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology at Emory. Before joining Emory, he taught at the University of Chicago. He also is a founding member of the Center for Fundamental and Applied Molecular Evolution (FAME) and the Center for the Analysis of Supramolecular Self-assemblies (CASS). In 2002, Lynn was named one of 20 inaugural Howard Hughes Medical Institute professors, receiving $1 million over four years to translate his passion for science to the undergraduate classroom. The result has been a series of freshman seminars called "Origins of ORDER (On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers)," which has brought graduate students to the classroom to share a broad array of current research with first-year students.

Each year the Great Teacher Lecture Series showcases some of Emory's most gifted faculty members. Lynn's lecture is one of a series jointly sponsored by Emory's Center for Lifelong Learning, the Emory Office of Public Affairs and the Association of Emory Alumni. For more information, go to: http://www.cll.emory.edu/gtls/index.htm.

Emory University is known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities. For more than a decade Emory has been named one of the country's top 25 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, the state's largest and most comprehensive health care system.

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