9UNP0206SD_Aseem_Ansari_WordPress

- Welcome everybody to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension. And on behalf of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you Aseem Ansari of the Department of Biochemistry here at UW-Madison. He's going to be speaking to us about a Legacy of Ingenuity: The 40th anniversary of the Awarding of the Nobel Prize to Professor Har Gobind Khorana. This is a special season, because the Nobel prizes are awarded every first week of October. And 40 years ago, one of our own, Professor Khorana, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. 

And it's a pretty amazing thing because he's shared the credit for cracking the code, cracking the genetic code and for first synthesizing a gene. And professor Ansari will also be talking about a new program to honor that tradition of ingenuity, and collaboration between India and the United States, and specifically India and UW-Madison called the Khorana Scholars Program. Aseem is associate professor of biochemistry here at UW-Madison. He's also with the genome center. He received his bachelors of science from St. Xavier's College in Bombay University in India. He received a PhD from Northwestern University. And he was a post-doc of the Helen Hay Whitney Fellow at Harvard University and MIT. And in 2007 he founded the Khorana Scholars Program. Would you please join me in welcoming professor Ansari to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
(applause)
 
- Thank you, Tom. Thank you for the introduction. So it gives me great pleasure to talk about Professor Khorana, both as an Indian and as a faculty member of the Department of Biochemistry at Wisconsin. I first ran into professor Khorana himself in an elevator at Harvard Fairchild Building. I was working as a post-doc there, and this famous scientist at least in India's science, he's an icon. He entered the elevator, and I just like usually have no trouble speaking. But I was stuttering, and I was searching for words. I introduced myself and said hello, I'm Aseem. So he sort of gruffly nodded. And I said your work on chemical biology inspired me. 

He sort of shook his head and said, "Ugh, chemical biology." And I'm like okay, I thought you'd be happy about this, you pioneered the field. He said, "It's just biology." It's just chemistry of life. What is this nonsense. And this happens to be in a building right next to the Harvard chemistry department, which after much fighting, had changed its name from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. So here's a man that just given a lecture and claims that chemical biology is an artificial buzz word. He's the one who helped create it. And so, you know, sort of, he asked me what do you do now. I said I'm a post-doc in this fellow's lab, Mark. 

Another icon in molecular biology. And he sort of looked down and said that he used to be a good scientist. Is he still golfing? Blew all of my little views of how this man would be. He's an iconoclast, clear thinker and not up for much nonsense. And so this was my introduction to Khorana. Khorana, in our minds, back home in India is someone who somehow sprouted in India and landed at MIT, and did all these amazing things there. You can imagine my surprise that when I came to do my interview here for a faculty position, there's this metal marker out there that says Khorana synthesized, first of all cracked the genetic code at Wisconsin, just across the Henry Mall. Next he synthesized the gene at Wisconsin, in that really terrible lab that I wouldn't take as a faculty member today. 
(laughter)
It sort of humbles you.

It's not the space, it's what you do with it, right. The science that you do in a little bit of bad space. So then I started reading up on his history, and it was incredible. It's incredible in many ways. And it highlights the beauty of scientific thought. It highlights the amazing nurturing environment that Wisconsin provides to scientists. And let me give you an example. Khorana was looking at nucleotides, and he managed to string them together. I don't know what detail I'm supposed to go into. I see my colleagues are here, so they don't need to hear any of this. 

But the idea is-- (inaudible)

- Okay, fair enough. So looking at the genome. Let me give you first the scope of what his achievements have contributed to modern science, to my type of science. To go from the time when it was not clear how things are inherited. How offspring contain the traits that the parents have. In early '40s I believe, there was a paper put together by, I believe it was Max Dellbrook, who talked about crystals, and how these might be what contained the genetic information, to discovery of DNA as a genetic material for heredity, and all that sort of information. To the point where people said how's this code retained in DNA, how does it code for things that actually do work. This is the time when Khorana was doing his chemistry. He was an organic chemist focused on very small molecules that form the building blocks of DNA. All right, so from synthesizing those-- a dream for an organic chemist is to be able to generate life-like molecules, or molecules that play a role in biology around us, and be able to interpret, using those molecules, how biology does its work. 

Khorana, looking at genetic material, trying to figure out if he can synthesize the individual building blocks, arrived at Wisconsin, and decided to build strings of these building blocks, individually called nucleotides. The chemistry that he pioneered to be able to string these things together, led to the revolution of molecular biology and recombinant DNA technologies, led to the revolution of vaccines that are being now synthesized entirely in labs. More importantly, it's led to synthetic genes and synthetic biology. This is where you completely synthesize the genetic information that encodes foreign organism. And once you synthesize this, you can essentially bring that DNA to life creating new life forms. That is what's happening today. From 1960, when he started working across the hall to 2008, when the first paper was published in Science a few months ago on synthesizing whole genomes, meaning all the DNA completely synthetically in a test tube on a machine, if you will, in an automated way, I type in the entire genetic information that is going to code for an organism that DNA is made in pieces, pasted together, put into a bacteria. The next thing you know, that bacteria is alive, and its future functions are encoded by the DNA that I made. This is what Khorana's chemistry did for us. And it's also allowed us to gain enormous insights into how biology works. 

Genetic mechanisms, diseases that are caused by genetic aberrations, etc. Because he could make short DNA nucleotides that then could be used to pull out or amplify larger bits of DNA, that then could be cloned, proteins could be made, they could be studied. And what is even exciting, on a side, is that the same technology he pioneered led to many Nobel prizes afterwards. Many of his student have gone on to be multi-multimillionaires. Not just one, many. So that's the chemistry. It's pioneered the major biotech companies like Amgen, and people are now using this technology to go after prehistoric creatures like the Neanderthals, trying to understand what their genetic code was. Trying to recreate like Jurassic Park, genomes of organisms that no longer exist. So this is the areas that he's had an impact. On an intellectual level beyond this, he's brought together fields that never talk to each other. 

He was one of the many. He's not the only one. He was at the forefront where chemistry, biology, physics I don't know how it was 50 years ago. But in India today, still, we suffer from the British education system, where if you want to be a chemist you cannot have classes in biology. If you want to be a physicist, the class of physics is at the same time as the class for genetics. So you cannot take those at the same time. You're classified early on, by the time you're 15. Your future is defined for you. And this man was educated in pre-independence India in the '20s. He was born in the '20s, educated in '30s, '40s and then he went off to England. 

Trained as a classic organic chemist. Applied that information to study classically biological problems of heredity and genetic diseases, bringing those fields together. Then applying engineering aspects to build synthetic genomes, etc. So he's connected fields, areas, disciplines that have never been mixed until his time. And this brings me to, you know, this is a little bit of a personal aspect of it. It brings me to what Wisconsin offered a man like Khorana. Khorana finished his undergraduate degree in India. A bright young man, from modest means. His father was a low middle-class individual. Went off to college, was recognized as a very promising, intelligent student. 

Found a fellowship, went off to Liverpool in England to get his PhD. It's a good place, it's not Cambridge, it's not Oxford. It's a good place. Coming from India, it's great. Especially in the '40s. He got his PhD there. Got his post-doc. Applied for a job in India. Please, you can't hear me? 
- Can you just talk a little louder?

- I wonder if my mic is on, perhaps. I'll move it up a little. Does that help? Now can you hear me? Is that any better? I can yell, that's all right. So he finished his undergraduate degree in India, went off to do his PhD at Liverpool in England, in organic chemistry. And then after that, so this is crux of the story, he applied for a job as a lecturer, as an assistant professor in a very small school in India. This is Khorana, we are talking about, someone who is recognized as an intelligent man in that period, and he couldn't get a low class job in a small university, because in India it was a political appointment. So had he gotten that job, there would be no Khorana. 

There would not have been any of the synthetic biology stuff that I'm talking about. And perhaps someone else might have done this. But the elegance with which he did these studies, and the expedience of his work and the rapidity of which it's changed the entire area of modern biology and chemistry, and even engineering now, biological engineering of things, would have taken a different course. So he could not get that job as a lecturer, because somehow someone found a reason why Khorana was not good enough. He goes back to England for a second-- or to Switzerland. This is where Einstein got his degree. Then from there, he found his way to Vancouver where he studied carbohydrates for a while. He came to Wisconsin in 1960. And here he found the likes of people like Julius Adler, who's sitting right there in the middle, staring at me with a little bit of discomfort, where he started talking about the genetic code, and how this might be coded, how could this be decoded or deciphered using chemical tools. Interaction with colleagues like Julius and students like Tony, his post-doc. 

I forget his last name. This led to a decade of truly astonishingly insightful work right across the street. So this is the beauty of Wisconsin. You took Khorana, and you made him all that he could be. Had he been in India, he would not have been as productive, I suspect. 
- Are you going to tell something about his years that he didn't go to school until he was 10 years old, and that he was working on the banyan tree. 
- Now that you've said it, I don't need to. 
(laughter)
(inaudible)
So what the professor, another icon of molecular biology at Wisconsin, brought up is I presume you interacted with Khorana a lot when he started. 
- We came at the same time. 
- There you go, so did Julius. 

- In the '60s. 
- That's right. So this is typical in India, in villages in India, where Khorana grew up, which is now, by the way, part of Pakistan. The British have a way of drawing lines that doesn't quite follow the ethnic people that live in those lands. But in any case, it was an Indian fellow. And in villages in India, there are no schools, so what teachers do is gather students under a leafy tree and the banyan tree that the professor refers to has particularly big leaves, so it gives you a larger coverage. These things grow with large girth and cover a large space, so you can have a lot of students. And the teacher will stand in the shadiest part, and the latecomers have to sit out in the sun. And the instruction begins. And so that is Khorana started his education. 

And most kids, see, this is what's extraordinary, there has to be a little bit of forces at play, if you will, children from that background with that poor preparation for the world can still rise. And people like Khorana can still happen. Right? So you come from that little village school, where you might be taught by someone who himself doesn't know what he's talking about. And I'll give you an example of that. Then to go into an academy which is a good school at the time in the '40s, and continue onwards, go to Liverpool for his PhD, etc. So an example of what these village schools do for you is that the ambassador from India, actually, was telling me that when he was a young man, Khorana won the Nobel prize. Khorana is an icon in Indian science. I may not have stated this strongly enough. But this electrified a whole generation of students. 

So this current ambassador went running to his teacher and said who is this Khorana and what did he do? And the teacher said, apparently of biochemistry, he said, "I don't know, but it is important." And that is the level of instruction people get at village schools in India. But of course now we have amazing universities, and I'll tell you a little bit about them. So when I found this marker I asked students in my lab, I don't know if I should continue down on the personal rather than the science. The science is basically revolutionary. He won the Nobel prize for this work, deservedly. And the things that he discussed in his papers have led to other Nobel prizes, like PCR, etc., cloning of genes. And I can go on in that direction. 

But let me just tell you a little bit more about the personal aspects that you may not find in textbooks. When I found the sign out there in something like this that says Khorana won the Nobel prize, I asked my students if they've ever heard of Khorana. These are chemical biology students, and it's a brand new exciting field, and they had never heard of him. And so at that point I thought, you know, it would be nice, as it says in the Ten Commandments, honor thy father, right, somewhere I think it says that. Or honor your scientific predecessors. We started asking why is it that people have such short memories of the major contributions that change the way we think and do science today. Right? And in some ways, science always looks forward. You'll see it constantly dealing with the current frontier. And so that's the answer. 

I think that is a reasonable argument why they shouldn't have to remember who did what before. All that matters is what they do next. Would you agree with that? No? But in any case, what he decided to do at that point is encourage more interactions, extend the Wisconsin idea. So a year ago, I had been on this bus trip which takes 40 faculty members across the state. Once you arrive, you refresh, they take you around the state. They introduce you to various parts of Wisconsin, people of Wisconsin, things that motivate Wisconsinites. And it really anchors you to the state. And the university calls it the Wisconsin Idea. 

The spirit that the university's boundaries don't end at the campus, they extend over the state and that the university works for the state. We take this a little further. We say the Wisconsin Idea goes global. We try to connect the University of Wisconsin with India, with the Indian subcontinent or other countries. And so what we've done is to honor Khorana. And in that way, prepare future generations, rather than worry about what he has done and how his research has deeply impacted our lives, not just the science that I do, or people in chemical biology might do. It has deeply impacted our lives. Recombinant DNA technology and the future of synthetic biology. I mean, just imagine if you can reprogram your genome, would you do so? And these days, it's major ethical questions, right? 

Would you generate life forms? How would you deal with those life forms? All of this has become possible. This impacts society on a very large scale. In any case, so the idea is to look forward and inspire the next generation of students who have the spark in them, give them the opportunity, increase their vision, increase their horizons. As Einstein said, "A mind once expanded never regains its original dimensions." Then let them loose on the world and see if they can accelerate the scientific march forward. So the idea then is to, of course, you've heard enough about Gobind Khorana, and he's still here. He will be here next year at a symposium the Biochemistry Department is organizing called a Steenbock Symposium. The symposium, if you guys wish to come, is on synthetic genes, which is what Khorana did here, to synthetic life, which is what his work led to, and is happening as we speak. 

and will cover all the aspects of it, and where you try to bring in people who are also talking about how biology and life forms might change. How we will start to integrate more with the virtual computer world, if you will. Ray at MIT wrote the book, "Singularity is Near." We are trying to bring him in as the scope of rare synthetic genes and synthetic life is going. So that will happen next year. Khorana will come for that. He's agreed to come and speak in August of 2009. I encourage you to come visit and talk with him if you will. So coming back to the idea of connecting Wisconsin to India, generating more Khoranas, and also taking Wisconsin students over to India, introducing them to a world that is very unlike their own, and very similar to today's world of global interactions and global networks. This is when we asked Khorana if he would be interested in supporting a program between University of Wisconsin and top institutions in India, where we exchange students, faculty, scholars, and build virtual communities, scientific communities, where one doesn't have to be in Wisconsin or in India, but you're connected virtually, seamlessly. 

Ideas flow back and forth. Scientific progress goes forward collaboratively, synergistically, right? He got really excited and said, "Yes, I would be very happy," and then he went on to recount how he-- This is just a brief letter from him to the chancellor. But then he went on to recount how he had wonderful times with Julius discussing science here, and how he would love to come back and see how Wisconsin was doing, and this would be wonderful for all those talented people across the world to talk to each other. Maybe, there will be less miscommunication. So the person who drove this-- Actually, we met right outside this room. It's Ken Shapiro, right here. Ken is the Dean of International Studies at the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. This is Kim Santiago. She's the director of Asia Outreach Programs for the University of Wisconsin. 

She also works with WARF and the Alumni Association. And they were hosting a program for Singapore students right in this room, as I discussed, perhaps you could do this with India. They went with me to India. And basically, these were the objectives that were defined as we went around India, in a haphazard way, to seven different cities over 14 days and 50 different meetings from government officials to undergraduates. And so, these are the objectives of the programs that we started with Khorana's blessing. In a way to honor him and to, you know, find talent and bring it to bear on problems that matter to us all. So the first is, of course, to provide a transformative and international experience to students both from the UW and from India. Once you visit a different country, it changes you in a very fundamental way. It's changed me, and it changes students who go to different countries. And so we decided to bring students over, and major labs, really leading labs in different areas from engineering to basic sciences and even healthcare, public health issues as well. 

So bring undergraduates over from India, the best ones, give them a chance to see how people think about science over a period of the summer. So the National Science Foundation here in the U.S. has such programs to bring in students who do not have much research experience, over to the UW campus. And there are about 10 or 15 such programs on campus in many different areas. So we followed that template and we brought in about 15 students this year. And now we are planning to find Wisconsin students who would like to go out to India. Some of them are from agricultural, some from health, the medical school, and Engineers Without Borders, etc. There's huge interest in exploring what India has to offer. And to our surprise, actually, the business school is really interested. Wouldn't have guessed. The other aspect, as we say here, contributing in Indian rural development, but the way the program is shaping up is again, it's a partnership. 

So that's the second objective. Wisconsin is, in many ways, a leader in agricultural and dairy development. And so a lot of the knowledge here would really benefit people because they use the same cows and get 1/10 the yield. And so the question is what's the problem? So actually February of this year, or March of this year, we went off to India, the dean and myself, second trip to India in two months. And in a rural village, villages that I had never visited growing up in India, it's really surprising. Let me see if I have photographs of this. We found the same Holsteins and Jerseys that you see walking around in Wisconsin. And the trouble is that the sweltering heat, and the traditional methods that people in India use to raise their cattle and, you know, the dairy industry in India completely does not work for Wisconsin cattle or European stock cattle. The simple things like giving them more water, not giving them rice stalks, giving them wheat stalks, etc. 

Simple things like this makes a tremendous difference. I had no idea. This actually seems trivial, but it dramatically changes the lives of women in rural India. There are beautiful studies that say if you improve the quality of a woman's life, it not only changes her immediate family, it changes a whole network, a village network. So we focused on that again, and the Khorana program, bringing modern technology to India. And what I hadn't appreciated is that the indigenous things that have been developed back in India, became of incredible interest to the dairy and agricultural leaders from here in Wisconsin. So it's turning out to be more of a partnership. And even in biofuels, the way Indians use cow dung to create fuel. So it's turning out there is more interaction, people are going over, in fact, I'm leaving for India on Saturday with a few soil specialists, dairy personnel and the dean, to exactly go check this aspect of this program. The third part of it is increase collaborations between U.S. and Indian industries and academia. 

So increase public/private partnerships. And the governor of the state announced that he was going to take a trade mission to India, and been very interested in doing this under the Khorana program. But there are many industries in Wisconsin that could really expand, if they could interact with the Indian workforce and communicate more clearly what could be or couldn't be done. It makes them more of a global player, rather than having to compete with the coasts. East and west coast biotech companies already do this. And so Wisconsin's now poised to do this. Agricultural businesses, etc. And I can tell you that we recently received a grant for a million dollars from a foundation in India to increase interactions between Wisconsin and Indian industries. So these are our objectives. We're filling them in. 

And it's turning out that it helps the state of Wisconsin, as well as many students and people in India. But phase one of this program has been to bring students in from India, select really talented students, bring them to India. Phase two would be adding more partners and providing students with a transformative experience. Yeah, here's the details for the first objective. The program's about ten to 12 weeks. We bring in students, we place them in major labs. Now we're going back, actually, next week to finalize where we will place Wisconsin students in India. And this will be in areas of information technology, where India is doing extremely well in application of technologies to agricultural and biofuels. So these are the students we brought in last year. They presented their work and generated a lot of interest. 

This is in genomics. One student worked in genomics. The other one was in nano-fabrications. So you take really small materials to build three-dimensional structures. Controlling matter at scales that you cannot even see or hold. But you use biological principles of self-assembly. This, of course, relies on Khorana's ability to synthesize DNA, so in this building, a technology was pioneered by someone who we will here next week. To synthesize DNA molecules on a glass slide as you wish. And the company that now that spun off on this work is Nimbleton, which has just been acquired for $100 million. But in any case, this relies on Khorana's chemistry to be able to do this. 

And you can design these DNA molecules in a pattern, and you can use that pattern to attract bridging molecules, bridging DNA molecules. That's what one student did. So you synthesize a glass slide in micrometer, this is a millionth of the width of your hair, you know, thickness. You can generate spots that contain a given molecule of interest. You generate a pattern of those molecules. You bring in a larger piece that can recognize two spots on that glass slide, acts as a bridge, right? And so based on the pattern that you created, you can build different structures. You can use that to build three-dimensional structures. You can build railroads. You can build cages. 

You can build reaction chambers that are really small. Or you can do single molecule. You can catch one molecule at a time and modify it, and study it in ways, move it along, do work at a nanometer scale. That sort of nano-fabrication combines what Khorana's chemistry did, and what was pioneered by people in this building in engineering and chemistry and microbiology. This student worked on studying how proteins fold and unfold, how they recognize surfaces, another major problem in biology and in nature. How do two things come together? How do they know to come together perfectly and not in an incoherent way? There is a recognition pattern in there that defines everything that happens in ourselves, that specificity is critical for function and it's very loose. If we were to look at individual components, those interactions are weak. They're not terribly tight or specific, and yet as a combination of molecules, the interactions are very specific, do a perfect, you know, come together perfectly, and do a specific function. 

So how does that all happen? That's what he worked on. They did really well. And this year we brought in about 15 students in a broader range of subjects. The program is going to expand next year to include postdoctoral fellows to have joint PhD programs in areas in India where they've really pushed forward on informatics. So one thing that we do well here at Wisconsin is information analysis, and if you're looking at biological information, it's called bioinformatics. But this, in India, has been pushed way beyond what is done at Wisconsin. So we are collaborating now as partners with India to have students who have been trained in informatics and computer software design data analysis, data set development. And have them work with biology students here who are generating that kind of data. And together, perhaps draw more insights, rest in our knowledge from nature that will help us understand how everything works. 

And the hope is then to send UW students to India in areas where India's doing well, and has developed new technologies across various fields. This was the beauty of Wisconsin. So it turns out when we went out to India in January, we are not the only ones who thinking of this. MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge and Oxford have campuses in India. So initially when I suggested that we have a collaboration between Wisconsin and India the argument at the legislature level was, you know, yes we have problems, we have limited funds, and we don't have money for charity, and we have enough students. We don't really need to go looking for students. And let me tell you, you know, MIT was out there. The day we met with the head of what is equivalent of the NSF in India, the next person in line was the Nobel Laureate David Baltimore from CalTech, followed by Eric Lander of MIT, who's heading an institute, followed by Bill Hazelton, who used to be at Harvard. This was his schedule to meet with potential partners. And after we described the program, after we had mentioned that Khorana had been here and done his work here, and had been encouraged to truly build his program here, he said that's it. 

At the end of the day, after he'd done all his meetings and met us for drinks, and said we've decided for engineering, we're going to Berkeley, for everything else Wisconsin. So this is what Khorana does, you know? Part of it is the excellence in the University of Wisconsin in a broad range of things. Where MIT can offer you high tech, and Cornell can offer you agricultural, Wisconsin offers you everything. So my colleague Ken Shapiro has this list. There it is. He says we are number one in all these fields, and the sciences of physical sciences and biological sciences. What other school can do this? And it gets the attention of the administrators. We think we'll make a major impact, where Wisconsin will have a lasting legacy, in addition to training Indians and training Wisconsin students in India, is in rural development. 

As I said, you know, the dairy industry here has so much that it can offer. Again, you know, the sciences and agricultural are no longer separated. All the tools that were developed by Khorana, and others here, directly impact all the aspects of like development, rural development, agricultural, dairy, etc. Every aspect of our life. Then this is just an example of one of the Holsteins that they didn't know that if you have a Jersey. This looks like a Holsteins, apparently it's 70% Jersey. And I myself had never seen something like this before. So this is Bob Kaiser, who's a dairy expert here at Wisconsin, out in a village. That's the woman who spent all her life savings trying to get this cow. It turns out, this is something you learn if you're in dairy industry at Wisconsin, that Jerseys, if they calf a second time, suffer from osteoporosis. 

So they lose a lot of calcium from their bones. But this is not something an Indian would know. So what happened, is this cow, when she went to deliver her second calf, suffered from paralysis and wouldn't move. She basically just lay down and wouldn't go anywhere. Her back legs actually atrophied over a period of two months. All she needed was two injections of calcium. Right? And that's what Kaiser here basically told them. It was just heartbreaking for me there to interpret, because the woman was like, this was her life savings. It's about $500 for that cow, right? 

And she had no idea. And it all ties back to, you know, just this sort of fundamental interaction. And then what they had done to help their cows along was something that Bob was very interested in. He's going back again to see what's been done there. That's him milking a local Indian cow. This is soil sciences, we've gone off and looked at different soils and how that has been used by Indians to take brackish water and highly alkaline soils, and what indigenous solutions to that problem have been. And so now people are going to study that. And now there is a lot of interest in increasing collaborations between private sector and academia across Wisconsin and India. So these are some of the things that people are thinking of internships between companies. Tech transfer courses. 

Entrepreneurship. In essence, building tighter economic ties that benefit both partners. So that is where this program is off to. All of this started with basically the first objective is to give people with talent a chance at expanding their natural talent, exploring scientific horizons and doing, you know, the best research that we can do at Wisconsin. That's where it started. It all goes back to Khorana's story, where a talented young man studying under the banyan trees, as he pointed out, was able to come to Wisconsin. And I stress this enormously, because this has been my own experience as an Indian-American, that this university and this state provides a really fertile and welcoming environment. Fertile environment for research and welcoming environment for an individual to truly go out and do the best they can do at scientific frontiers. And had Khorana, you know, I submit to you a provocative statement, that had Khorana gone on to get that lectureship in India, I don't think he would have done anything of any value, and you would have never heard of him. And the way he recognized that is that when the Indian Prime Minister called him and he won the Nobel Prize 40 years ago, across the street. 

He was here when he won it. When the Indian Prime Minister called him to say, well, it is a day of enormous pride for all Indians, the first Indian to have won the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. He stopped her halfway. This is not someone you stop in the middle of a sentence! He stopped her, and said, "No I am sorry, I won it as an American-Indian." I didn't win it as an Indian alone. I won it as an American first, then an Indian. And so that tells you what Wisconsin has done for science, and for people who come here from different corners of the world to do science here. And with that I would like to stop and take any questions that you might have. 
(applause)
 
- I worked for three years for Khorana. 

And not to correct you, but most of his work was done over at the Enzyme Institute. 
(inaudible)
 
- He started across here, apparently, right, in the old building, maybe Julius can help me. Enzyme Institute, all of it? Okay. 
- Enzyme Institute, yes. I'll tell you what happened, that led it to be discussed-- Left Wisconsin. 
(inaudible)
 
- Sorry? 
- And he was being replaced by four or five of us. That was when Khorana came. 
(inaudible)
 Came about two years later. 

Not in '60. 
- I came in '60. 
- In '60? 
(inaudible)
 
- He was really incredibly helpful in starting this program. He saw me reading that sign and saying, yep, he was here. And then he contacted Khorana, and got the program going. 
- And then Julius Adler and Khorana got his Nobel Prize at a big party in his house. 
(inaudible)
 
- That was the least he could do, right? If you win the Nobel Prize, would you have a party at your place? I hope you invite me. 

- Sure. 
(inaudible)
 
- I was over at-- in '64, and I was in Yugoslavia at the time that he won the Nobel Prize. And I didn't realize the significance. 
(inaudible)
 But it always amazes me that he had like six or seven post doctorates working with him, and he was in charge. But there was never anything mentioned about all the other people that worked with him. And I just don't understand why the Nobel Prize, where it is a team effort like it is. He had two Germans, two Indians, Israeli, Australian, English and one American. He didn't like the Americans. 
(laughter)

(inaudible)
 
- Okay. 
- But these people, the post doctorates, they would be there working sometimes 2:00-3:00 in the morning. 

I'm sure Khorana got a lot of information from those people, as well. 
- So science is not done in a vacuum. Right? As I'm here reminiscing about Khorana, etc., there are people in my lab, 18 people in the lab working right now. It's 8:00, so actually three. The rest have gone home. And you're absolutely right. Science is never done in a vacuum. All of us have gone through the process of apprenticeship, right? 

As an undergraduate, as a PhD student. After PhD, you do a postdoctoral research fellowship. And yes, you're right, the Nobel Prize is given to people for a singular achievement. And it's usually given to a team head. Right? The argument being, and this you might argue with the Nobel committee, not with me, that it is the environment that that lab offers and the scientific direction that the mentor offers is what is being honored. It's rarely given for a broad set of experiments that are done, or a huge set of incremental insights that lead to a major idea. It's rare. It does happen. Typically, Nobel Prizes are given for a single, clean experiment that changes the way we think about the world scientifically. 

Or, it's given for technologies, right? That change the way science can be done. So Timon's idea, for instance, you know, offer retro viral-- intermediate, won him the Nobel Prize, right? PCR was a technique. Polymerase Chain Reaction that came from Khorana's work in making DNA, small bits of DNA that can be used by enzymes to copy the enzymes that exist in ourselves, to copy the template, right? That led to a technology that allows us to take miniscule amounts of DNA from a Neanderthal or a dinosaur, amplify it and say, this is what the gene was like, and this dinosaur gene looks a lot like chicken, not a lizard, right? That technology is what got the Nobel Prize. So yes, you're absolutely right large teams work closely. There's a lot of inter-related. If you read some of these books by Watson and Crick, so the person I worked for was a protégé of Jim Watson's of the double helix fame. 

If you read the book by Watson and Crick, especially Crick's book, you see the sort of human dimension to the science that we do. These are not objective androids working in a little room. We are individuals. We enforce our ideas. We push data one way or the other. We think about things. That thinking is most certainly influenced by all the people around us. The students, right from the undergraduates to people like my mentors out here, who have been here 20, 30 years longer than I have. All of this plays a role. But it is, you know, the one person that is given the prize, and that is their policy. 

And you might argue that Nobel Prize recognizes one person, it's not that. It's the idea that matters, right? The person comes and goes. The worst case scenario is that Mahatma Gandhi never won a Nobel Peace Prize, right? So what good is a peace prize? Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize. You draw your own conclusions. 
(laughter)
 So prizes don't matter. It's the ideas that change our world. And those don't belong to anybody. 

Professor? 
(inaudible)
 
- Because I'm using-- He introduced us to synthesis of DNA, organic chemicals. And he systematically running things first in England, etc., developed metals, all the protective groups, and all that to build it up. It was extremely aberrant. It was really his bookkeeping, he was amazing, which he could keep all this for people-- everybody with a little piece and put it together in DNA. But there is always a progress in chemistry, in organic chemistry. At the present moment, with the exception I guess of protective groups, which he introduced, everything is different. Somebody would synthesize in the same way, and that, in addition, is automatic. 
(inaudible)
 But completely synthesize-- 100 times faster. 

- Yes, faster but the basic chemistry's the same. 
- So much in the beginning. At the end, he was left out entirely, of the field of synthesis. And he transformed it. He did very interesting work. He realized that with so many, that's enough. He started. The other took over. 
- You tell me, you know, isn't that the satisfaction of having changed people's thinking enough? 
- Yeah, that's the most important thing. 

- If a student takes it forward, isn't that wonderful? 
- Change thinking, like coding by gamma. Before gamma, nobody even thought about coding as a problem. I remember when gamma, the first time lecture was like, it was amazing when he came and says, you know, the five bases of DNA, someone says there's not five, there's four. Ah, there's four. And there's 21 amino acids. Somebody says not 21, 20. He says doesn't matter. But the problem is how to translate four to 20. And then he explained. 

Immediately, paper after paper appeared in that field. Gobind was one of them. And it's funny, because he should have gotten Nobel Prize in synthesis of DNA. Instead they give him for coding which he contributed immensely, but that was just small one application of his work, because he was able to make templates, and then attach them. Then I remember one more story from his time. People said, well, there was interplanetary communication was very famous then, and he says that somebody got through to Khorana from another world, and told him what sequence he could synthesize with dot, dot, dot, dot. He did it and that took over the world. 
(laughter)
 
- It's a story. 
(inaudible)

- Also a Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick, thought that the human race was seeded by aliens. So we all are allowed our fantasies time to time. 

(laughter)
 I think Professor Nelson has some comments. Dave, I think you were preparing some comments, right? There you are. 
- You've done wonderfully already. I think I'll desist. 
- You sure? 
- Yeah. 
- You know, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to colleagues like Dave and Julius, who, like you pointed out, influenced me greatly. And I hope that their ideas benefit my science. But yeah, thank you very much for making all this possible. 

And I thank Khorana for making it possible for people like me to exist. I would have done something very different with my life if there wasn't a Khorana. Maybe I wouldn't be doing science, if there wasn't University of Wisconsin. So thank you, very much. 
(applause)