Nobel Laureate Ardem Patapoutian to Deliver 2025 Konrad Bloch Lecture on May 15

                    Nobel Laureate and HHMI Investigator Ardem Patapoutian, PhD will deliver the 2025 Bloch lecture. His talk, “May the Force Be With You! Piezo Channels in Mechanosensory Biology,” will take place on Thursday, May 15, 2025, at 12:00 noon in Northwest Building Lecture Hall B103.

Dr. Patapoutian is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator and Presidential Endowed Chair in Neurobiology at the Dorris Neuroscience Center, The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. His groundbreaking research on mechanosensitive ion channels, particularly Piezo1 and Piezo2, has transformed the understanding of how cells sense physical stimuli such as touch and pressure. This work, and similarly groundbreaking work temperature-sensing ion channels from the TRP (transient receptor potential) family, earned him the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Since receiving the illustrious prize, Dr. Patapoutian has been a very strong and tireless advocate for science and for funding of research.
Dr. Patapoutian earned his PhD in Biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he trained with Dr. Barbara Wold. He completed postdoctoral work at UCSF with Dr. Louis Reichardt before launching an influential career that has included leadership roles at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation and a longstanding tenure at Scripps Research

About the Konrad Bloch Lecture
The Bloch lecture, sponsored by Pfizer, honors Harvard faculty member and Nobel-prize recipient Konrad Bloch (1912-2000), a pioneer in the field of cholesterol and lipid metabolism. 

Konrad E. Bloch was an outstanding scientist who helped shape the discipline of biochemistry in its formative years.  One of the founders of biochemical studies at Harvard, he was part of the pioneer generation that included George Wald, Paul Doty, John Edsall and Frank Westheimer. Best known for his studies of cholesterol, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1964 (shared with Feodor Lynen) for investigations in the mechanism and regulation of cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism. Especially noteworthy were the studies on the biological synthesis of the molecule and, according to the Nobel Prize website, “on various aspects of terpene and sterol biogenesis…enzymatic formation of unsaturated fatty acids and…in various aspects of biochemical evolution.”
Arriving at Harvard from the University of Chicago in 1954, he was appointed Higgins Professor of Biochemistry, a position he held until his retirement in 1982. He was part of the core group at Harvard that founded the Committee on Higher Degrees in Biochemistry. With the somewhat later arrival of James Watson, Matthew Meselson, Walter Gilbert, Mark Ptashne and Guido Guidotti, Harvard had achieved a remarkably dynamic and productive core group in biochemistry and molecular biology, of which Dr. Bloch was a signal part. The late Dean Jeremy Knowles described him as “a marvelously perceptive biochemist and a wise, generous and cultivated man who forged the connections between chemistry and biochemistry. He was one of that distinguished line of European biochemists whose deep understanding of metabolism laid the chemical foundations of today’s biology.” [quoted in Harvard Gazette, Oct. 19, 2000]
Dr. Bloch was born in Neisse, then part of Germany, in 1912; he was racially excluded from his studies at Munich in 1934 upon the Nazi advent to power. His subsequent odyssey began in Switzerland, and he was spared a likely fatal return to Germany by the intervention of John Anderson, a Yale biochemist, who helped him with a visa to the US. In America, his studies resumed at Columbia; after a brief stay in Chicago, he came to Harvard.
His work was widely recognized; in addition to the Nobel, he received the US National Medal of Science, and many other awards and honorary degrees. In addition to his scientific output, he wrote intriguing popularizing works such as “Blondes in Venetian Paintings, the Nine-banded Armadillo, and Other Essays in Biochemistry”. He died in 2000, at the age of 88. In 1986, the annual Konrad Bloch lecture was inaugurated in his honor.

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Prof. Guido Guidotti for reviewing the text for accuracy.
 by Jim Henle 