People: Two Alzheimer's Disease Researchers Are Awarded Met Life Foundation Prize; Obituary : Howard Temin

Two Alzheimer's Disease Researchers Are Awarded Met Life Foundation Prize Date: April 4, 1994, pp.23 Blas Frangione, a pathologist from New York University Medical Center and Allen Roses, a neurologist from Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C., were presented the Metropolitan Life Foundation Award for Medical Research on February 16 in Washington, D.C. Each received $200,000 toward his research and a $50,000 personal prize. Roses, chief of neurology and head of a research team at the Joseph and Kathleen Bryan Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Duke, describes the award as critical to allowing his team's research to move forward. "The Met Life award basically gives us funds so that we can initiate a number of experiments that we would ordinarily have to wait months for grant applications to filter through the system [in order to have funding to conduct]," he says. Frangione, a professor of pathology and head of NYU's division of Alzheimer's disease research, hopes to increase the efficiency of his laboratory with his award. "With part of the money, I would like to update my equipment, which is almost 20 years old and requires a lot of material to run each month," he says. Frangione developed a method for extracting cerebral amyloid (Journal of Experimental Medicine, 158:623-8, 1983), a protein found in the brain that is thought to contribute to the degradation of brain cells in people with Alzheimer's disease, the fourth-leading cause of death among adults. More recently, Frangione identified a mutation of an apolipoprotein (APOE4) that is elevated in Alzheimer's patients, as a possible "pathological chaperone" (Neuroscience Letters, 135:235-8, 1992). In normal situations, these chaperones are "proteins that bind to other proteins and change the shape of the molecule in order for the molecule to perform its function," explains Frangione. However, he hypothesizes that APOE4 causes deleterious changes to amyloid protein molecules, thus possibly explaining some of Alzheimer's pathology. Roses studies late-onset Alz-heimer's disease using genetic techniques similar to those used in researching cystic fibrosis. As he explains, "sporadic-form patients [older patients without a family history of Alzheimer's] were not previously considered to have a genetic basis" to their disease. However, in 1992, using information from families with a history of Alzheimer's disease, Roses and his team found evidence that the gene associated with Alzheimer's disease coded for APOE4, in both familial and sporadic forms (Neurology, 43:1467-1472, 1993; Science, 261:921-3, 1993). Frangione explains that the research in his and Roses's laboratory is very important to the study of Alzheimer's disease because they combine "new ways of thinking to develop new approaches" for combating the disease. Their work may potentially lead to a therapeutic approach and, possibly, a predictive test for relative risk for Alzheimer's. Frangione received his M.D. from the University of Buenos Aires in 1953 and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, United Kingdom, in 1969. Roses received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. --Karen Young Kreeger Howard Temin, a Nobel laureate and a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, died on February 9 in Madison, Wis. Temin, who was well known for his lifelong campaign against cigarette smoking, died of adenocarcinoma, a type of lung cancer not usually related to smoking. He was 59 years old. Temin received the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology, along with Renato Dulbecco, his Ph.D. adviser, and David Baltimore, for their work in understanding the role that viruses play in the onset of cancer. In the 1960s, he proposed, from his work with cancer-causing viruses that carry their genetic information in RNA instead of DNA, that these viruses could copy their RNA into an infected cell's DNA. This idea challenged the current theory that genetic information always passes from DNA to RNA. In 1971, Temin discovered reverse transcriptase, a viral enzyme that copies RNA into DNA. Reverse transcriptase was independently discovered by Baltimore. These and other contributions by Temin over the past 35 years have advanced the field of molecular biology, particularly in the technology that resulted from the discovery of reverse transcriptase. For example, this allowed researchers to find and identify the AIDS virus. Temin started work at the Mc-Ardle Laboratory for Cancer Research at UW-Madison in 1960 and continued there until his illness, which first manifested itself 17 months ago. He held the American Cancer Society Professorship of Viral Oncology and Cell Biology, the Harold P. Rusch Professorship of Cancer Research, and the Steenbock Professorship of Biological Sciences. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Temin had been awarded many honors for his lifetime work in unraveling the mechanisms of cancer. These included election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974, foreign membership in the Royal Society of London in 1988, and the President's National Medal of Science in 1992. He was an author of more than 300 publications and served on numerous editorial boards and national and international advisory committees on cancer and AIDS research. Temin received his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in 1955 and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1959.

People: Two Alzheimer's Disease Researchers Are Awarded Met Life Foundation Prize; Obituary : Howard Temin

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