DEPARTMENTS OF CHEMISTRY AND
PHARMACOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Present
Francis Johnson’s 2nd Annual
Symposium
Thursday, May 1, 2014
4:00 PM
Simons Center - Room 103
About the Speaker
Carolyn Bertozzi is the T.Z. and Irmgard Chu
Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Professor of
Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, an Investigator
of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a Senior
Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory. Her research interests span the disciplines of
chemistry and biology with an emphasis on studies of cell
surface glycosylation pertinent to disease states. Her lab
focuses on profiling changes in cell surface glycosylation
associated with cancer, inflammation and bacterial
infection, and exploiting this information for development
of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. She has been
recognized with many honors and awards for her
research accomplishments. She is an elected member of
the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences,
and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has
been awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Wieland Prize,
and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, among many
others.
Program
Opening:
Dr. Michael Frohman
Professor and Chairman, Department of
Pharmacological Sciences
Director, Medical Scientist Training Program
(MD/PhD, MSTP)
Introduction of Speaker:
Ms. Megan Himmler, Ph.D. Candidate
President, Graduate Chemical Society
Speaker:
Dr. Carolyn R. Bertozzi
T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished
Professor of Chemistry
Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell
Biology, University of California, Berkeley
Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute
Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory
Closing:
Dr. Nicole Sampson
Professor and Chair of Chemistry
Co-Director, Chemical Biology Training
Program
Reception to follow
About Francis Johnson
Francis Johnson was born in Bristol, England but was educated in
Scotland. He obtained a B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Glasgow
University then in1954 moved to the U.S.A. for postdoctoral
training at Boston University in the laboratory of Walter Gensler. In
1957 he joined the Eastern Research laboratory of The Dow
Chemical Company (Director, F.W. McLafferty) where he rose
rapidly to the top-rank position of Research Scientist. In November
1973, he joined the faculty of the Department of Pharmacological
Sciences at Stony Brook as Professor of Pharmacology with a
joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry.
The more significant scientific contributions of Francis Johnson
have been in three areas, namely stereochemistry, the structure
and synthesis of natural products and the chemistry of DNA
damage and repair. In the field of molecular structure, Dr. Johnson
advanced a theory of conformational behavior of unsaturated
compounds called “Allylic Strain” that covers many areas of chemistry and biology. The principal
review article describing these ideas is one of the most quoted papers in the organic chemical
literature. In area of natural products, Dr. Johnson is best known for his work on the glutarimide
antibiotics such as cycloheximide, the antitumor anthracyclines, thermorubin, avenaciolide, the
prostaglandins and bleomycin. In the course of this work two new reactions were discovered,
one involving the anionic rearrangement of aryl acetylenic ethers and the other, a new type of
condensation reaction between alkyl benzoates and benzyl cyanides, substances that have
been known for more than 150 years---new chemistry from ancient compounds. Dr. Johnson is
the author or co-author of more than three-hundred publications in peer-reviewed journals.
However, DNA damage and its repair have occupied much of the time that he has spent at
Stony Brook. In this area his efforts have been devoted mainly to the synthesis of abnormal
DNA nucleosides (xenonucleosides) that represent either xenobiotic, oxidative, or radiation
damage. He first introduced the now popular “tetrahydrofuran” as a stable abasic site model and
demonstrated the use of the “carba” nucleosides as non-hydrolysable substrates for DNA repair
enzymes especially those associated with oxidative damage. Dr. Johnson was also the first to
devise general totally synthetic methods for the site-specific introduction into DNA, of the
damage caused by a) the unsaturated aldehydes such as acrolein, b) the carcinogenic amines
including the food mutagen PhIP, and c) the polyaromatic hydrocarbons(PAHs), specifically the
most carcinogenic metabolites of benzo[a] pyrene – the principle pro-carcinogen in tobacco
smoke.
More recently his research has focused on the highly nephrotoxic and carcinogenic Aristolochic
Acids (AAs). These are naturally-occurring plant substances, found in many herbal products
that have been in use for thousands of years. Recently it has been recognized that their chronic
use leads to death by kidney failure and/or cancer development. Both of the DNA adducts
formed by AAII have been synthesized and introduced into oligomeric DNA in his laboratory, for
biological studies by other team members. In addition, a general method of synthesis of these
substances and their metabolic products has been developed.
He is he co-founder (with Dr. Ramesh Gupta) and president, of Chem-Master International Inc.,
a company that serves the synthetic interests of pharmaceutical companies and academic
scientists who work at the interfaces of Chemistry, Biology and Medicine. Recently the
Company has expanded into the area of drug development. One of these, where the IP is
shared with Stony Brook University (major collaborator Dr. Lorne M. Golub), involves a series of
non-toxic drug substances that inhibits diseases of collagen loss such as periodontitis,
osteoarthritis and wounds. This is an exciting area because it deals mainly with aging and
associated diseases and has the potential to slow disease development later in life.