For the fourth year in a row, the LMB’s HR team, supported by colleagues throughout the LMB, raised money for Macmillan Cancer Support by taking part in the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning. LMB staff demonstrated their talent for baking and donated a wide array of sweet snacks for everyone to enjoy.
The money raised for Macmillan Cancer Support allows them to support those with cancer, by treating them as individuals and not just as patients.
Over 30 LMB researchers have taken part in a range of activities as part of LifeLab 2018 and Big Biology Day, bringing their research to public spaces in Peterborough and Cambridge in the form of hands-on activities and discussions.
LifeLab is a European Commission-funded programme of events taking place as part of European Researchers’ Night and was one of 55 similar projects happening around Europe.
At the end of a highly stimulating LMB Lab Symposium, Jan Löwe, LMB Director and Chair of the Max Perutz Fund (UK charity 1129597), was delighted to announce the winners of the Max Perutz Student Prize and the newly awarded Brenner Postdoc Prize.
The Max Perutz Student Prize has been awarded annually since 1984 for outstanding PhD work performed at the LMB.
Gero Miesenböck will give the 2018 Francis Crick Lecture on Wednesday 24th October 2018 at 11.00am in the Max Perutz Lecture Theatre at the LMB. The lecture, entitled “Light Sleep” is open to anyone in the local area who is interested in attending.
Gero is Waynflete Professor of Physiology and founding Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford.
Tom Steitz, Nobel Laureate, known for his ground-breaking work on the structural basis of the central dogma including the ribosome, died on Tuesday 9th October, at the age of 78. Tom was Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and Professor of Chemistry at Yale University, USA. He and his wife Joan were postdoctoral scientists at the LMB for 3 years from 1967 to 1970. They remained good friends of the LMB all their lives.
Greg Winter from the LMB’s Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry (PNAC) Division has been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Greg shares half of this year’s prize with George P. Smith, with the other half being awarded to Frances H. Arnold, for developing a method known as phage display and using it for the directed evolution of antibodies, with the aim of producing new pharmaceuticals.
A group of 17 children joined postdocs from the LMB and the Department of Biochemistry to review science books, learn more about what it’s really like to be a scientist and try hands-on experiments at the Eddington Postdoc centre in west Cambridge.
Wanda Kukulski, group leader in the LMB’s Cell Biology Division, has been awarded the Royal Microscopical Society’s Alan Agar Medal for Electron Microscopy for 2019 for her work in the field of Correlative Light-Electron Microscopy.
The Royal Microscopical Society launched a series of medals in 2014 to coincide with its 175th anniversary and awards these medals every 2 years.
Celebrating the work of Fred Sanger on the centenary of his birth. One modest, reserved man, working at the lab bench in a small laboratory in Cambridge, invented a technique that would be used worldwide and would forever change how problems in biology and medicine were viewed. That man was Fred Sanger, born 100 years ago on 13th August 1918, and the technique he developed was dideoxy sequencing of DNA.
The annual LMB art show this year expanded its remit to include craft, in particular the work of the newly formed LMB Craft & Chatter group. The group exhibited a variety of crochet and needlework, alongside art show favourites of paintings, drawings, photographs and paper craft.
Over 20 exhibitors participated, with photography being one of the most popular categories.