User:Alice.haugen/Sheldon Penman

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Sheldon Penman is a physicist, molecular biologist and cell biologist distinguished for having made seminal contributions in three separate fields, the non-conservation of parity, RNA metabolism and cellular architecture. Presently an emeritus professor of cell biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is a member (since 1986) of the National Academy of Sciences in the section of Cellular and developmental biology and received the E. B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology jointly with James Darnell in 1998.

Life
Born in Russia

Jewish

He received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1954 from Pennsylvania State University where he was on the Dean's list and used his electrical engineering in a practical context when he and another student ran a "wired wireless" radio station (shown in this newspaper photograph)

He received a Ph.D. in high-energy physics from Columbia University in 1958. Anecdote of his insight and generosity:

He became an assistant professor at MIT in 1962, and a full professor in 1971

His commitment to education at all levels was shown when he agreed to become a trustee, in 1968, of the Sudbury School during a difficult time for that institution.

He supported South Vietnam as an "lively, vital and relatively open society that has made impressive strides in education, medical care, land reform, etc., against what seem insuperable obstacles."

Trained with James Darnell in Alex Rich's lab "While at MIT I was also fortunate to be influenced by Salvador Luria, Cyrus Leventhal and Boris Magasanik, through courses, seminars, and personal discussions. At that time Sheldon Penman and Jim Darnell were also working in Alex Rich's laboratory. When placed in the same room, these two were particularly boisterous, providing comic relief to the fast moving era."

Graduate advisor to Robert Weinberg

Guggenheim Fellow, 1982, Organismic Biology & Ecology

Darnell's E. B. Wilson speech

The Wilson citation (excerpt):

"Both awardees have made extra-ordinary contributions to the understanding of the cell biology of the nucleus, providing pioneering insights into eukaryotic RNA synthesis, maturation, function and metabolism, and setting the groundwork for subsequent discovery of introns and RNA splicing....[Subsequently] Penman concentrated on the architectural organization of the cytoplasm and nucleus matrix and went on to discover their roles in transcriptional regulation."

Matritech - technology from Sheldon Penman and  Edward Fey using antibodies to find proteins

NYT article on Patent 4,882,268 for detecting cancers by their nuclear proteins

Nuclear physics
Non-conservation of parity in mu meson decay with Garwin (Fun with Muons)

NMR transition into biological molecules

Molecular biology
Polyribosomes 1963

Cell Biology
The E. B. Wilson Award is the highest scientific honor conferred by the ASCB and is the highest award in cell biology.

His engineer's eye and constructive scepticism about common assumptions is represented in this quotation on information and biological form: "'Form and structure are not natural subjects for biochemistry that, in the macroscopic world, deals with scalar quantities--i.e., amounts, rates, etc. Building the complex designs glimpsed in any anatomy or physiology text requires, at the very least, instructions that are vectorial--i.e., that specify direction and place. These instructions are encoded somewhere--it seems very likely that they reside in the heavily transcribed but 'non-protein coding' DNA. Building staggeringly complex organs--e.g., brains or kidneys--by simply specifying the constituent protein components (as suggested by the more extreme formulations of molecular biology that genes are simply proteins) is unlikely. Such a strategy would be tantamount to trying to specify a bridge or an edifice by merely giving a list of parts. Indeed, Gray's Anatomy, seen with an engineer's eye, suggests that the complexity of the instruction sets for mammalian morphology require large regions of the genome: very likely much of most of the currently ignored, non-protein coding, 90% (or more) of the genome. I suspect that future cell scientists will marvel at the density and ingenuity of genome instructions for structure while wondering how we could overlook them for so long'"

Targeting tumors with auxotrophs

Patents
The practical orientation of an engineer combined with his growing understanding of the nucleus as structurally distinct and organized led to six patents issued to Sheldon Penman, listed below:


 * 4885236 - A method for characterizing the origin and malignancy of cellular materials
 * 4882268 - A method for determining the tissue of origin of a cell and degree the presence of malignancy
 * 5273877 - Non-histological cell type determination
 * 4569916 - Assay for tumor promoting agents
 * RE35747 - Method for determining tissue of origin and presence and extent of cellular
 * 5624799 - Cancer-associated mar binding protein