The Ellison Medical Foundation symposium Differential Gene Expression in Development and Aging, the third in a Fall series of sponsored symposia on aging, was hosted by David Baltimore (Nobel Laureate 1975) at the California Institute of Technology on October 11, 2000. The symposium began with the announcement by Joshua Lederberg (Nobel Laureate 1958), Chairman of the symposium, that Eric R. Kandel, one of the five members of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Ellison Medical Foundation, and Paul Greengard, one of the most recently appointed Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholars will share the Nobel Prize for Medicine and/or Physiology. News was also made in the genetics of aging, such as longevity genes, genetic responses to food and the environment, and powerful tools used to study the function of genes in time. The work of Drs. Kandel and Greengard in signal transduction in memory, learning and neural action, directly relates to loss of these functions in aging. These topics were discussed in Pasadena by David Baltimore, President of the California Institute of Technology - The Basic Science of Aging, David Botstein of Stanford University - Genome Wide Gene Expression in Cancer, Joseph Takahashi of Northwestern University - Circadian Clock Genes in Mammals, Richard Weindruch of the University of Wisconsin - Gene Expression Profile of Aging and Its Retardation by Caloric Restriction, and Andre Nussenzweig of the National Institutes of Health - The Role of DNA Double Strand Repair in Genomic Stability and Tumorigenesis.

Dr. Andre Nussenzweig described how cells maintain genomic stability, which is essential for preventing cancer and cell death. Dr. Joseph Takahashi said that aging is the passage of time, and his research explains how animals and cells tell time, using a special set of "clock genes." Dr. Richard Weindruch has determined how the aging process affects the activity of thousands of genes and how low calorie diets, which retard aging, influence these changes.

J. Craig Venter, Founder of Celera Corporation, delivered The Norman Davidson Lecture on the campus later in the afternoon and attended a reception hosted by David Baltimore and Alice Huang which allowed for further scientific exchange with the Ellison Medical Foundation scholars.

It was a day to remember and can be revisited at the website of Gerald Weissman, http://praxis.md/post/thisweek/101800, member of the Ellison Medical Foundation Scientific Advisory Board.