Paul Zamecnik

Paul Charles Zamecnik (1912- ) is an American scientist, Professor of Medicine Emeritus, Harvard Medical School and Senior Scientist, Massachusetts General Hospital, who played a central role in the early history of molecular biology. Zamecnik pioneered the in vitro synthesis of proteins and helped elucidate the way cells generate proteins, and with Mahlon Hoagland, co-discovered transfer RNA (tRNA). Through his later work, he is credited as the inventor of antisense therapeutics. Throughout his career, Zamecnik earned over a dozen US patents for his therapeutic techniques. He still maintains a lab at MGH where he presently studies the application of synthetic oligonucleotides (antisense hybrids) for chemotherapeutic treatment of drug resistant and XDR tuberculosis.

Education and research

Paul Zamecnik was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He attend Dartmouth College, majored in chemistry and zoology, and received his AB degree in 1933. He then attended Harvard Medical School and received his MD degree in 1936. Between 1936 and 1939, he worked at Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital in Boston, Harvard Medical School, and Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland. [Rheinberger, p. 38]

During his Lakeside Hospital internship, Zamecnik became interested in how cells regulate growth, and hence, in protein chemistry. He was awarded a Finney-Howell Fellowship and a Moseley Traveling Fellowship to go to the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen where he worked with Dr. Kai Linderstrom-Lang. His planned time in Copenhagen was cut short because of World War II—the Germans occupied Denmark from April 1940—and he and his wife, Mary Connor, returned to Boston where he became an Assistant Physician at the Huntington Memorial Hospital, studying the toxic factors involved in traumatic shock for a wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development project led by Huntington director Joseph Aub. After a year in New York at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research studying protein synthesis with Max Bergmann, he returned to Harvard in 1942 to join the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School where he became Instructor and then Professor of Medicine. [Rheinberger, pp. 38-39]

Paul Zamecnik is generally regarded as the founder of antisense therapy [Zamecnik P.C. e.a. (1978) "Inhibition of Rous sarcoma virus replication and cell transformation by a specific oligodeoxynucleotide." [http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=75545 "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" January;75(1)pp. 280-4] ] .

Zamecnik has authored or co-authored 210 peer-reviewed scientific articles. He has won many distinguished awards, including the National Cancer Society National Award in 1968, National Medal of Science in 1991, and the first-ever Lasker Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. Zamecnik is also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Society of Biological Chemistry, American Association for Cancer Research (President 1965-66), Association of American Physicians, Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the American Philosophical Society. Zamecnik married Mary Connor in 1936 (deceased 2005), and together they had 3 children.

Notes

References

*Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. "Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube". Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

External links

* [http://www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/library/lumin_zp.html Lasker Luminaries: Paul Zamecnik]
* [http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/zamecnik.html Inventor of the Week: Paul C. Zamecnik]