Spreading peace through science and commerce in developing countries
Chiang Mai Mail - Saturday, February 07, 2004

Chiang Mai University (CMU) will welcome a very famous keynote speaker who will give an address on applied gene information on Thursday, February 12, at 2 p.m. He is Dr. Richard J. Roberts, a Nobel Laureate for Medicine and a research director at New England Biolabs, Beverly, Massachusetts.

Dr. Roberts was educated in England, attending the University of Sheffield where he obtained a B.Sc. in Chemistry in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1968. He joined Dr. J.D. Watson and began to work on newly discovered enzymes in 1972. Over the next few years more than 100 such enzymes were discovered and catalogued in Dr. Robert's laboratory.

Dr. Roberts has also been involved in studies of Adenovirus-2 and discovered split genes and mRNA splicing in 1977 for which he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1993. His laboratory sequenced the 35,937 nucleotide Adenovirus-2 genome and wrote some of the first programs for sequence assembly and analysis. DNA methyltransferases are an area of active research interest and in collaboration with Dr. X. Cheng, DNA base flipping was discovered in 1993.

Dr. Robert's current interest focuses on the identification of restriction enzymes and methylase genes within the GenBank database and the development of rapid methods to assay their function.

For information and free tickets telephone (053) 943 661-5, 224 076 and 941 007, fax (053) 219 252, 943 666 and 942 666, email opxxo004 @chiangmai.ac.th or vpi@ chiangmai.ac.th