Conversations with Giants in Medicine
In this episode, Ushma Neill speaks with the living Editors in Chief of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. They were asked to reflect on their time as editors and their favorite memories.
In this episode, Ushma Neill talks with Dr. Stanley Prusiner. The discovery that a protein alone could be infectious, proposed by Stanley Prusiner of the University of California San Francisco, was considered heretical in 1982. Now considered orthodoxy, at that time scientists thought that the only infectious agents could be bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. We now know that these proteins, termed prions, which acquire an alternative shape and coax their neighboring proteins to do the same, undergird a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. For his dogma-shattering work, Dr. Prusiner has been widely recognized, including with the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Ushma Neill with the Journal of Clinical Investigation Series, Conversations with Giants in Medicine met Dr. Elias Zerhouni at the Lasker Awards in September of 2023 and jumped at the opportunity to be able to spend an hour with him. Zerhouni, who is Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and Vice Chairman and President of OPKO Health, is a radiologist by training, who focused much of his research on CT and MRI-based imaging methods to diagnose cancer and cardiovascular diseases. He notably served as the director of the US National Institutes of Health from 2002 to 2008 and later as president of global research and development at Sanofi.
In this episode, Ushma Neill speaks with physician and geneticist Dr. Funmi Olopade. Dr. Olopade is the founding director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics and Global Health at the University of Chicago. Olopade's research is focused on gaining a better understanding of the root causes and genomic basis of cancer in diverse populations. She is internationally renowned for her work in inherited cancer syndromes and for her clinical expertise in early detection and prevention of breast cancer in high-risk women.
A committed champion of vaccines and vaccine diplomacy, Dr. Peter Hotez is the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology at the Baylor College of Medicine. As codirector of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Hotez has led the development and clinical trials of low-cost vaccines for hookworm infection, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, and various coronaviruses. His persistence in the face of online and in-person harassment is impressive. This is an interview with Dr. Hotez from a stop on his book tour at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on September 20, 2023.
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ISSN: 0021-9738 (print), 1558-8238 (online)