By Ted Gregory
Monday’s closing (click here) of the renowned Yerkes Observatory after 121 years hits Kate Meredith professionally and personally.
As education outreach director there, Meredith has scrambled over the last few months to find a temporary new home for the program, which has been located at the ornate observatory for about 20 years.
And since she and her family live in a house on the bucolic Yerkes site on the shore of Geneva Lake, she has to move now too.
“When I stop moving some days,” she said one hectic afternoon, “I just fall asleep.”
A cherished southern Wisconsin landmark that has been home to Nobel laureates and important scientific achievements, Yerkes has now outlived its research usefulness. Sometime Monday, University of Chicago, which owns Yerkes and is selling it, will lock entrance gates to the observatory grounds. About a dozen full-time employees, including Meredith, have lost their jobs, she said.
“When you’re coming from Yerkes, nothing looks pretty,” Meredith said of her new office, a little more than a mile away. “But it’ll be our home and it will be drama-free, hopefully.”...
By Todd Ackerman
MD Anderson immunologist Jim Allison, pictured in 2015, discovered a natural brake on the immune system, then developed a drug to release it, jump-starting the era of cancer immunotherapy.
Houston scientist Jim Allison (click here) was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine Monday for his pioneering research that has led to a new type of cancer treatment that frees the immune system to attack tumors.
Allison, MD Anderson Cancer Center's chairman of immunology, conducted research that's led to a class of drugs that unleash immune system brakes. The research realized the tantalizing promise of immunotherapy, which is now taking its place alongside surgery, radiation and chemotherapy as a prime weapon against cancer....
...The drugs developed by Allison and others belong to a class known as checkpoint inhibitors. In some patients, they have produced lasting benefits in advanced cancers considered incurable, particularly in such diseases as lung cancer and melanoma. Scientists around the world are experimenting with different combinations of immunotherapy and other treatment in a bid to extend the benefits to more patients.
Allison started his career at MD Anderson in 1977, one of the first employees of a new basic science research center located in Smithville. He was recruited back to MD Anderson in November 2012....
...Allison in 2015 won the Lasker Award, which is often called the American Nobel. He has been awarded dozens of other prizes.
Allison will be honored at Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm in December.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has now been awarded 108 times to 214 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2017.
