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Jonathan Carlson tries to understand how HIV adapts when it is attacked

Yesterday’s opening ceremony was concluded with a panel session that featured Bill Gates, Nobel laureate Ada Yonath, Sandra Chisamba and Jonathan Carlson. Together they discussed how we should deal with threats to global health, such as HIV and malaria, and how young scientists could be stimulated to research these important, but relatively neglected topics. Jonathan Carlson was […]

Christine Ottery

Laying down the global health gauntlet

The panel on global health at the opening ceremony of the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau well and truly laid the gauntlet down to young researchers from around the world. On the panel was: Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Ada Yonath, Noble Laureate in […]

Beatrice Lugger

Sandra Chishimba and her fight against Malaria

Today the 61. Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting will be openend and Sandra Chishimba will play a special role: She will take part at a panel discussion together with Bill Gates, Nobel Laureate Ada Yonath (Chemistry 2009) and Jonathan Carlson (Microsoft Research) – maybe because Malaria is the main topic of her life. She has battled […]

Ashutosh Jogalekar

The challenges and allure of protein design: A memo for this year’s young researchers

An inspiration from the birth of aviation A few weeks ago I visited the small coastal town of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. Kitty Hawk is where the Wright brothers made their epoch-making first powered flight. Big stones mark the start and end points of the flight. There is a huge monument on top of […]

Ashutosh Jogalekar

From messy to magical: Preparing for the future of medicine

In the early 1940s, as war raged over the continent, the British mathematician Freeman Dyson and the Indian physicist Harish Chandra were taking a walk in Cambridge. Harish Chandra was studying theoretical physics under the legendary Paul Dirac while Dyson was getting ready to spend a depressing time calculating bombing statistics at Bomber Command. “I […]

Lou Woodley

An Interview with Francoise Barré-Sinoussi

Francoise  Barré-Sinoussi won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for her role in the discovery of HIV. As she detailed in her plenary lecture on Monday 28th June, she considers a combined approach of mainly Western-led lab-based research and locally based education and treatment centres in developing countries as crucial for the control of […]

Martin Fenner

Interview with Edmond Fischer: pianist, microbe hunter, pilot and Napoleon expert

Edmond Fischer shared the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edwin Krebs "for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism". I had the chance to talk to him in Lindau last week.   My name is Edmond Fischer, but everybody calls me Ed. I’m a retired professor at the University of Washington […]

Ashutosh Jogalekar

Infections and Disease: The Golden Age?

Harald zur Hausen’s discovery of the link between infection and cancer provides a window into what may turn out to be one of the most fascinating lines of inquiry in twenty-first century medical research: the link between microorganisms and what have been traditionally considered chronic diseases. This line of inquiry is founded on an evolutionary […]

Jessica Riccò

Evolution – aiming to an objective?

This is a translation of Bastian Greshakes article "Evolution – auf ein Ziel hin?" in the German blog posts  Werner Arber is at the Lindau meeting for the tenth time this year and again he has been giving a lecture. His topic for this year’s meeting was “Genetic and Cultural Impacts on the Course of […]

Lou Woodley

Personalities, puns and pictures in the plenaries

We’ve all had bad experiences of sitting in lectures, trying to focus on the slides while feeling like we’re really missing out on the key points of the subject. You want to stay motivated and learn something new, but somehow the speaker doesn’t make it easy for you. How to encourage good science communication was […]

Martin Fenner

On artificial and synthetic cells

Monday morning Jack Szostak talked about his ongoing work on creating artificial cells, where he is trying to create simple protocells from chemically synthesized material that in their simplest form only contain a membrane and genetic material. Later in the afternoon Hamilton Smith gave a detailed account of the work by the J. Craig Venter Institute cumulating in the […]

Jessica Riccò

More than HPV: Vaccines against cancer

The late morning in Lindau was a non-stop marathon of medical researchers – first Harald zur Hausen talked about the links between infections and cancer, then Luc Montagnier gave an insight into his research that analyzes DNA under physical as well as biological aspects – venomous tongues may have linked that talk to homeopathy. At […]