Professor Stephen Curry, Division of Cell and Molecular Biology, persents his Inaugrual Lecture: 'My date with density: making mountains out of molecules'.

Abstract: “According to convention there is fire, there is water, there is air and there is earth. There is a sweet and a bitter, and a hot and a cold… In truth, there are only atoms and a void.“ Such at any rate was the view of Democritus (~400 BCE). For the time this was a very modern, though somewhat sterile, view of the universe. It leaves so much unsaid. Truth be told, it is amazing what you can do with atoms and a void. And by far the most amazing thing to have arisen from these atoms is life.

The 20th century saw the birth of our understanding of the atomic and molecular basis of life, helped in large measure by the development of X-ray crystallographic methods to take us far beyond the realm of our visual senses and reveal the structures of the molecules that living things are built from. My scientific interests have carried me deep into this molecular universe, a very alien landscape indeed. But the penetrating X-rays yield electron density maps that help us to chart this strange and unknown territory; at the same time they enlarge the molecules to be explored so that we can clamber over them and delve into each nook and cranny. In this lecture I will recount a few tales from my own expeditions to some of the protein molecules that underpin life—and to some that seek to destroy it. The journey has been arduous but never dull. However, there is much yet to discover and in many ways our travels have only just begun.

Biography: Stephen Curry, a native of Northern Ireland, arrived at Imperial College in 1982 to study physics. Despite a determined effort to leave at the end of his first degree, he stayed to do a PhD in Biophysics, investigating how general anaesthetic drugs bind to proteins using bacterial luciferase as a model system. This stimulated a life-long interest in proteins and the interactions they make with other molecules to sustain life.
Curry finally escaped in early 1989 to pursue these interests in greater depth and spent time labs in at the EMBL in Grenoble, the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright and Harvard Medical School in Boston, learning to apply X-ray crystallography to problems in virology.
Re-captured by the college as a lecturer at the end of 1995, he dug in and has continued to use structural methods to probe the atomic details of many different proteins involved in virus replication, focusing more recently on foot-and-mouth disease virus, but not forgetting his original obsession with drugs…

Chair: Professor Nick P. Franks, Biophysics Section
Vote of Thanks: Professor David I Stuart, MRC Professor of Structural Biology,

A pre lecture tea reception will be served in the Senior Common room from 16.45