Dr. Ron McKay to Receive Max-Delbrück Medal in Berlin

„Using the power of genomics and genetics Dr. McKay analyzed the development and the function of stem cells in the mouse and human nervous system. His work was fundamental for our understanding of the control of proliferation and differentiation of these cells. He showed that stem cells can generate synaptically active neurons and applied this knowledge to clinical models of neurodegenerative diseases”, remarked Prof. Björn Wallmark (Ernst Schering Research Foundation) in his address before the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Lecture on Molecular Medicine.

Dr. McKay‘s research group has found evidence for a common stem cell, generating both the central and peripheral nervous systems (CNS and PNS, respectively). This stem cell, in his view, provides an ideal system for analyzing the pathways that control ​“fate choice”. His group was able to demonstrate that embryonic stem cells from mice can be manipulated to generate both stem cells of the CNS and neurons or glial cells. He also has shown that stem cells can generate synaptically active neurons. Dr. McKay is convinced of the clinical potential for stem cell technology in treating neurodegenerative diseases. As such, his research uses clinical models of these diseases including Parkinson, Alzheimer and demyelinating disease.

Dr. McKay received his doctorate in 1974 from the University of Edinburgh/​UK and did his postdoctoral training at the University of Oxford. In 1978 he became a senior staff investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the USA. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984, where he continued to examine different aspects of neuronal organization in the nervous system. In 1993, he assumed his post as Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the NINDS. His laboratory is studying stem cell differentiation.

Begun in 1992, the Max Delbrück Medal is given annually to an outstanding scientist .It is awarded at the ​“Berlin Lectures on Molecular Medicine”, organized by the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, the three Universities in Berlin, biomedical research institutions, and the Schering Forschungsgesellschaft (Research Foundation). The MDC is a national research laboratory of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, and named after the Nobel Prize Winner Max Delbrück, a Berlin born physicist and biologist (September 4, 1906 Berlin – March 10, 1981 Pasadena/​USA).

The first Berlin-Lecturer was Professor Günter Blobel from the Rockefeller University, New York and Nobel laureate for medicine in 1999. His successors were the geneticist and Nobel laureate for medicine, Professor Sydney Brenner from the University of Cambridge (UK), the neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux from the Pasteur-Institut in Paris (France), the cancer researcher Professor Robert A. Weinberg from the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge/​USA, the prion researcher Professor Charles Weissmann from the University of Zürich (Switzerland), Professor Svante Pääbo Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (both in Germany), the Nobel laureate for chemistry from 1980, Paul Berg from Stanford University/​California (USA) and the biochemist Professor Joan Argetsinger Steitz from Yale University, New Haven/​Connecticut (USA). Recent award recipients include Professor Eric Lander from the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, USA (2001) and the biochemist and pharmacologist, Professor Roger Y. Tsien from Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of California San Diego, USA (2002).
 

Barbara Bachtler
Press and Public Affairs
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