Honoring contributions of Richard A Lockshin to the field of cell death.

摘要

On 10 December 2008, a scientific symposium was organized at The Rockefeller University by Zahra Zakeri and Hermann Steller to honor Dr. Richard Lockshin for his contributions to the field of cell death. Over 300 scientists attended this meeting. The speakers and chairs included distinguished scientists in the field, from 20 countries, who have contributed to this special issue. Richard Lockshin is one of the pioneers in the field of cell death contributing to the field for over the past 40 years and still remains one of the field's primary scientists. Rick was born in Columbus, Ohio in December 1937. His fascination and interest in the natural sciences from an early age led him to become a scientist. He obtained his bachelor's degree at Harvard University (1959), where he continued his doctoral studies with Carroll M Williams and received his PhD in 1963. The topic of his dissertation was published in a series of five landmark papers, beginning with 'Endocrine potentiationof the breakdown of the intersegmental muscles of silkmoths' coining the term 'programmed cell death' in 1964. H Robert Horvitz (one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in 2002) and Lockshin acknowledged the possibility that cell death may be regulated using nonmammalian model systems such as Caenorhabditis elegans and moths. This idea led to the elucidation of the genetic pathways of programmed cell death and has proven operative in mammals as well and has become a major area of scientific endeavor, as evidenced by the existence of this journal. Cell death is now the focus of much research not only in the area of basic science but also in understanding and controlling many diseases such as cancer, degenerative diseases, infection, and many others. Richard has studied the underlying mechanisms involved in programmed cell death using insects, and more recently, zebrafish, as model systems. He was among the first to report on alternative ways of cell death and the involvement of different proteases in cell killing. This finding now has blossomed into a major area of research in the field of cell death. His current research is a continuation of this in the developing embryo. Collaborating with several individuals, he was among the first to recognize and seek new proteins synthesized during programmed cell death; to study the physiology of dying cells and to question why they shrank; to recognize that the regulation of oncogenes was important incell death; and to emphasize that not all deaths were by classical apoptosis.