Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz is a developmental biologist who has explored early embryonic development and cell fates using mouse models to then move to human touching and defining the ethical and legal boundaries of working with human embryos. She has been a pioneer in culturing human embryos in vitro beyond implantation and constructing so called "stem cell-derived embryos" from pluripotent embryonic and multipotent trophoblast and extra-embryonic endoderm stem cells in vitro. She has been a Professor of developmental and stem cell biology ay=t the University of Cambridge and a Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She is a member of European Molecular Biology Organization, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and Polish Academy of Science. Magdalena was born in Warsaw Poland where she completed her PhD. She is a co-author of a book "The Dance of Life" that describes her scientific biography.
Harold Varmus shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with J. Michael Bishop) for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. His scientific activity over the past fifty-five years has principally focused on retrovirus replication mechanisms, the discovery and function of cellular proto-oncogenes, and (most recently) several aspects of lung cancers. He has served as Director of the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute and as President of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Harold Varmus established PubMed Central and co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a publisher of open access journals. Currently, he is the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, a senior associate at the New York Genome Center, and Chair of the WHO Science Council. Harold’s visit to Poznan is his first to Poland, where his paternal ancestors lived before moving to France and then the USA.
Harold E. Varmus
Weill Cornell Medicine
New York, USA
Virginijus Šikšnys
Vilnius University
Vilnius, Lithuania
His research focuses on the structural and molecular mechanisms of antiviral defense systems in bacteria and development of novel genome editing tools. Prof. Virginijus Šikšnys’s research on the CRISPR-Cas has had a major impact in the field of gene editing. He together with co-authors, published seminal papers on Cas9 biochemistry that were the foundation for the translation of CRISPR-Cas bacterial immune system into a powerful genome-editing tool. He is a member of EMBO, EAM, Lithuania Academy of Sciences and Norwegian Academy of Sciences and letters. His work has been recently recognized with several awards and prizes including the Kavli Prize.
Nikolaus Rajewsky is a pioneer of spatial omics and a leader in single-cell Biology. He founded and directs the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (Max-Delbrück-Center, MDC). He has received multiple awards including the most prestigious award in Germany – the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. His lab is world-wide recognized for contributing to the understanding of the function of RNA in health and the early onset of disease. Nikolaus is a full Professor at the Charité hospital in Berlin and elected member of EMBO, the German National Academy of Sciences, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He received an honorary PhD from the La Sapienza University in Rome. He is also a member of the IBCh PAS international advisory board. He has visited Poland and Poznan several times. This time his visit will be held under the auspices of the Federation of the European Biochemical Societies as a FEBS National lecture.
Nikolaus Rajewsky
Max-Delbrück-Center
Berlin, Germany
Adrian Krainer
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
New York, USA
Adrian Krainer investigates the fundamental mechanisms and regulation of human pre-mRNA splicing, and the role of defective splicing in cancer and genetic diseases. Adrian Krainer and his lab were involved in the invention and preclinical development of nusinersen (Spinraza), a splice-switching antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) that became the first FDA-approved drug for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and the first approved nucleic-acid therapy in neurology. He currently works as St. Giles Foundation Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a co-founder and Director of Stoke Therapeutics. Adrian is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and other prestigious academies and societies and received multiple distinctions including the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for the development of the ASO drug against SMA.
