Prof. Harry Noller University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

Harry Noller received his undergraduate training in biochemistry at UC, Berkeley. He did his graduate work on the mechanism of action of serine proteases under Sidney Bernhard in the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon, where he received his PhD in chemistry in 1965. His first postdoctoral... read moreresearch was carried out at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, where he studied protein chemistry under Ieuan Harris. In 1968, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is currently Sinsheimer Professor of Molecular Biology. In recent years, work in the Noller lab has led to the elucidation of the crystal structure of functional complexes of the complete ribosome, showing how the tRNAs and mRNAs interact with the ribosome, and how the two ribosomal subunits communicate across the subunit interface. The results of these studies and those from many other laboratories now leave little doubt that the ribosome is a macromolecular machine whose functional properties are based on RNA, rather than protein.