Nobel Scientists Craig Mello And John Mather To Speak On Origins Of Life And Universe

A free and public event, "On the origins of life and the universe: An afternoon with 2006 Nobel Laureates Craig Mello and John Mather," will be held at the Library of Congress on 26 July from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., in Room 119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street, S.E., Washington, D.C.



John Mather, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physics, will present the talk "From the Big Bang to the Nobel Prize." He will discuss the history of the universe in a nutshell - how the universe began with a Big Bang, how it produced an Earth where sentient beings can live, and how those beings are discovering their history. Mather also will discuss NASA's plans for the next great telescope in space, the James Webb Space Telescope. Planned for launch in 2013, the new telescope will explore the first galaxies formed in the universe and investigate where stars and planets are being born today.



Craig Mello, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, will give a presentation titled "Life on a Cosmic Scale: From the Primordial Soup to a Nobel Prize-Winning Worm." He will reveal what worms, petunias and humans have in common and what this means for the future prospects of life on Earth and beyond. Mello also will explain how RNA interference (RNAi) works and describe how, along with the human genome sequence, it promises to revolutionize medicine.



The event is sponsored by the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center and Science, Business and Technology Division, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).



Speakers



John Mather, recently named Chief Scientist at NASA, is an astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at Goddard Space Flight Center and leads the James Webb Space Telescope science team. He served as project scientist for NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which measured the spectrum of heat radiation from the Big Bang. As principal investigator for the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer on COBE, he showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 parts per million, confirming the Big Bang theory to extraordinary accuracy.



Craig Mello is the Blais Professor of Molecular Medicine and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His research is focused on gene regulation during development and the mechanism of RNA interference. Along with Andrew Fire and colleagues, Mello reported in 1998 that double-stranded RNA can induce sequence-specific gene silencing in animals. Along with researchers around the world, Mello and colleagues went on to show that the underlying mechanism is conserved in numerous other organisms, including humans, and is even essential for human life.







Sponsors



Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to stimulate, energize and distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information on fellowships, grants and programs offered by the Kluge Center, visit loc/kluge.



The Science, Technology and Business Division of the Library of Congress provides reference and bibliographic services and develops the Library's rich and vast collections in all areas of science (with the exception of clinical medicine and technical agriculture), technology, business, management, and economics. For more information, visit loc/rr/scitech and loc/rr/business.



The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science (sciencemag/). AAAS was founded in 1848, and has 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS (aaas/) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy; international programs; science education; and more.


Contact: Tiffany Lohwater


American Association for the Advancement of Science