5:15 p.m., Oct. 17, 2008----The achievements of the 2008 Nobel laureates in the natural sciences were the focus of a symposium held by UD's College of Arts and Sciences Thursday afternoon, Oct. 16, in the Trabant University Center Theatre.

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The symposium featured talks by three prominent UD faculty in physics, chemistry and biological sciences, as well as remarks by Thomas Apple, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

Douglas Doren, associate dean for research in the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, also spoke at the symposium and moderated the event by introducing each professor and opening the floor to questions at the end of each presentation.

“I'm delighted to welcome our students, our faculty and our friends to this second annual Nobel Prize Symposium at UD,” said Apple, addressing the audience of students, faculty, staff and other members of the UD community in his opening remarks. “I'm also grateful to the faculty members who have, on incredibly minimal notice, come here to share their knowledge and insights on this year's Nobel laureates in the sciences.”

Those faculty members included Qaisar Shafi, professor of physics and astronomy, who addressed the work of this year's Nobel Prize recipients for physics; Brian Bahnson, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who addressed the work of this year's Nobel Prize recipients for chemistry; and Daniel Simmons, professor of biological sciences, who addressed the work of this year's Nobel Prize recipients for medicine.

Shafi summarized the work of Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, physicists who jointly won this year's Nobel Prize for Physics for their discoveries in the field of nature's broken symmetry. Shafi then gave an overview of the foundations of modern particle physics and defined, in layman's terms, what broken symmetries are and what role they play in the matter that makes up the universe.

“Symmetries are important, because conservation laws follow symmetries,” Shafi said. “But in any case, examples of broken symmetries abound.”

Some of the examples Shafi used to elaborate his point included superfluids, superconductors, spontaneous magnetization and snowflakes, which exhibit continuous symmetry broken down to a discrete symmetry.

Shafi, who cited charge conjugation (C) and parity inversion (P) as examples of discrete symmetries, went on to talk about this year's Nobel laureates' challenges to pinpoint CP violation and capped his lecture with his thoughts about the future of particle physics.

“Unless you have CP violation, you cannot explain anti-matter,” Shafi said, adding that dark energy (which makes up approximately 73 percent of the universe), along with dark matter (which makes up approximately 23 percent of the universe), are two of the biggest as-yet unsolved mysteries.

Shafi, who received his bachelor's and doctoral degrees in theoretical physics from the Imperial College in London, has worked on spontaneously broken symmetries, as well as on elementary particle (high energy) physics, including the origin of matter in the universe, big bang cosmology, dark matter and dark energy.

He also had the opportunity to work with the late Abdus Salem, who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979.

Additionally, he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize, and was awarded the Outstanding Scholar Award of the College of Arts and Sciences earlier this year.

Bahnson spoke next, discussing the work of Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien, chemists who jointly won this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing tools revealing the workings of the cell, specifically in their isolation of green fluorescent protein (GFP).

Bahnson traced the progress of the work to isolate GFP, from its beginnings in the 1950s up through last year, and showed how its isolation served many medical and scientific applications, including prostate cancer research and the detection of root fungi in arabidopsis, a model plant used by the scientific community for experiments in plant biology and genetics.

“There are numerous applications for this GFP research,” Bahnson said, including several here at UD.”

Bahnson then talked about his own lab research at UD, where he and students use cyan fluorescent protein and yellow fluorescent protein to study the oxidative stress response with group VIIB PLAZ proteins in human kidney cells.

Bahnson received his doctorate degree in chemistry from Brown University and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in enzyme kinetics and molecular biology and at Brandeis University's Structural Biology Laboratory in X-ray crystallography.

Simmons, whose talk concluded the symposium, discussed the work of Harald zur Hausen, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who won this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries of viruses linked to disease.

After opening his lecture with sobering statistics about the number of people who have died from and been infected with HIV-AIDS since 1981, Simmons noted the controversy surrounding this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine, which credited Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier for their work but excluded Robert C. Gallo, a longtime HIV-AIDS researcher whose work and discoveries paralleled those of Montagnier.

“What Montagnier did was to show that HIV was a retrovirus,” Simmons said, “and what Barré-Sinoussi did was to work with viruses collected from HIV-infected people. Because these viruses have been discovered, this led to the antiviral drugs that now allow HIV-infected people to live as long as non-HIV-infected people.”

Simmons then went on to cite the grim statistics from cervical cancer, a disease caused primarily by the human papilloma virus, and the work by zur Hausen that led to the recent development of the vaccine Gardasil®.

“zur Hausen went against the grain in believing that the human papilloma virus was responsible for causing cervical cancer, Simmons said. “His work has permitted the development of a vaccine that is highly effective in preventing cervical cancer in young women who are vaccinated before becoming sexually active.”

A virologist and researcher in the replication of polyomaviruses, a group of DNA viruses that under laboratory conditions can cause tumors in animals, such as hamsters, Simmons' area of expertise is the protein T antigen, made by the virus SV40 and responsible for inducing tumors in animals. He has studied both RNA and DNA viruses.

The afternoon was capped with a reception for speakers and guests in the theatre lobby.

Every year since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and world peace. In 1968, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was established. Each prize consists of a medal, a personal diploma and a cash award of about $1.5 million.

A second symposium, set for 2-4 p.m., Friday, Oct. 24, in the Trabant University Center Theatre, will highlight the work of this year's Nobel prize winners for peace, literature and economics. The free symposia, held each year following the announcements of the Nobel prizes, are open to the public.

Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photos by Duane Perry