Lectureship to Honor Nobel Prize Recipient

Columbus, OH - John Coffin, Ph.D. has been chosen to receive the Howard Temin Memorial Lectureship on October 14th, 2009 as part of a minisymposium on "Comparative Models of Leukemia and Lymphoma" at The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, Columbus, Ohio. This full day conference will provide education and awareness on comparative pre-clinical models of leukemia and lymphoma from a distinguished group of internationally renowned presenters made up of research scientists, veterinarians, and physicians. The symposium will also convene the opening of the new Center for Retrovirus Research laboratories and serve as the opening day of the International Association for Comparative Research on Leukemia and Related Diseases (IARCLRD) Symposium XXIV, "Molecular Approaches to Leukemia in the 21st Century: Biology Outcome Prediction and Personalized Therapy" to be continued on October 15 and 16 at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center in Columbus.

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Dr. Coffin is Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology at Tufts University, Boston, MA and Special Advisor to Director, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute. He pioneered the use of genomic analysis to understand the biology of retroviruses, elucidating their genetic organization, mechanism of replication, recombination, and transduction. His work provided insight into retrovirus-host association, and he has played a major role in public policy issues related to retroviral disease. Dr. Coffin received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in the laboratory of Dr. Howard Temin, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Charles Weissmann at the University of Zürich. In 1975, he joined Tufts University in Boston, where he was subsequently promoted to full professor and in 1994 was the recipient of an American Cancer Society Professorship. In 1997, he was named Director of the new HIV Drug Resistance Program in the National Cancer Institute, and he presently divides his time between Tufts University and the National Cancer Institute. In 1999, he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. His research findings have provided fundamental understanding of the interaction of retroviruses with their host cells and organisms.

Dr. Howard Temin, after whom the Lectureship is named, discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970's at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975, along with David Baltimore and Renato Dulbecco, for describing how tumor viruses act on the genetic material of the cell through reverse transcriptase. The discovery of reverse transcriptase is one of the most important in the modern era of medicine, as reverse transcriptase is the central enzyme in HIV-AIDS and other important human infectious diseases. Reverse transcriptase is also an important component of fundamental techniques in molecular biology and diagnostic medicine, such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).