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Return to: Schedule of Events
MBL Distinguished Alumni Lecture
 Saturday, June 7, 2003 - Meigs Room, 7:30 pm
New Thoughts on the Evolution of Chordates: From Morgan to the Colwins to the Future
Marc W. Kirschner, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Cell Biology, Carl W. Walter Professor of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School
Lecture Abstract:
The mystery of where our phylum, the chordates, emerged from the group of bilaterian ancestors around 600 million years ago has fascinated biologists for 150 years. William Bateson and T. H. Morgan pointed to hemichordates, a little known sister phylum for the chordates, as providing crucial cues. The best studied member of that obscure group is the acorn worm, Saccoglossus kowalevskii, studied by Laura and Arthur Colwin in the 1960’s at the Marine Biological Laboratories. In the past five years, John Gerhart (University of California, Berkeley) and I have returned to the question of where chordates came from using modern molecular methods, large scale DNA sequencing, and in situ hybridization. The answers have been surprising and may have given us a new glimpse of the early signs of the nervous system and the particular vertebrate mode of embryonic development.
Marc W. Kirschner, Ph.D. Dr. Kirschner is the founding Chair of the Department of Cell Biology and a founder of Harvard’s Institute for Chemistry and Cell Biology. A graduate of Northwestern University, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral research at Berkeley and at the University of Oxford, he was appointed an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. Prior to coming to the Medical School, he was a Professor at the University of California, San Francisco for fifteen years. He and John Gerhart are co-authors of Cells, Embryos, and Evolution (Blackwell, 1997).
Dr. Kirschner was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London and as a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea. He was the 2001 recipient of the William C. Rose Award, presented by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Later that year, he received a 2001 International Award by the Gairdner Foundation of Toronto. Most recently, he was awarded the Rabbi Shai Shacknai Lectureship Prize for 2003 at the Lautenberg Center for General and Tumor Immunology at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also served on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and is a Past-President of the American Society of Cell Biology.
The Kirschner laboratory investigates three board-diverse areas: regulation of the cell cycle, the role of the cytoskeleton in cell morphogenesis, and mechanisms of establishing the basic vertebrate body plan.
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