Hugh Pelham

Sir Hugh Pelham
Born Hugh Reginald Brentnall Pelham
(1954-08-26) 26 August 1954[1]
Fields
Institutions
Alma mater
Thesis Transcription and Translation in Reticulocyte Lysates (1978)
Doctoral advisor
Notable awards
Spouse Mariann Bienz (m. 1996)[1][5]
Website
www.csap.cam.ac.uk/network/hugh-pelham

Sir Hugh Reginald Brentnall Pelham (born 1954)[1] FRS FMedSci is a cell biologist who has contributed to our understanding of the body’s response to rises in temperature through the synthesis of heat shock proteins.[4] He has been the Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge since 2006.[6]

Education

Pelham was educated at Marlborough College in Marlborough, Wiltshire and Christ's College, Cambridge. He graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Natural Sciences followed by a PhD for research on transcription and translation in immature blood cells (Reticulocytes).[7] His PhD was supervised by Richard J. Jackson and Tim Hunt,[4] who went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001.

Career and research

Pelham is one of the foremost authorities on the movement of proteins within cells. Pelhams’s work has explained how some proteins can protect cells from damage. He has also shown how cells remove damaged or unwanted proteins — vital for maintaining their healthy functioning. More recently, his research investigates how proteins are modified and sorted to their correct places within cells and aims to find ways of blocking these processes.[4][8][9][10][11]

Pelham been a visiting professor at the University of Zurich and held many posts at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he succeeded Richard Henderson to become the LMB's Director in 2006.[4][6]

Awards and honours

Pelham was knighted by Elizabeth II in the 2011 Birthday Honours and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1988.[4] His certificate of election reads:

“ Distinguished for his contributions to protein biosynthesis, the control of gene activity and intracellular sorting. He developed a sensitive in vitro translation system, with which he discovered that naturally "leaky" termination codons exist in plant virus RNAs, and achieved the first correct synthesis and processing of viral polyproteins in vitro. He showed that the transcription factor TFIIIA, which is required in Xenopus oocytes for 5S rDNA transcription, binds to the gene product, %S RNA and is present in large amounts in oocytes. From studies on heat shock genes, he identified the first regulatory DNA sequence (the "Pelham" box) in a eukaryotic gene, proving this alone could confer heat inducibility on another gene. He has shown that this sequence is the binding site for a transcription factor which is modified by heat shock, thus establishing the basic mechanism of induction of these genes. He has clarified the function of heat shock proteins, finding that two of these reside in the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum. This led to his discovery that a C-terminal amino acid sequence is a novel sorting signal, preventing proteins from being exported from the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum.[12] ”

Pelham gave the Florey Lecture in 1992, was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 1998.[2] In 1999 he gave the Croonian Lecture and he was awarded the King Faisal International Prize in 1996.[3] He won the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 1991 and the EMBO Gold Medal in 1989. He was awarded the Colworth Medal from the Biochemical Society in 1988 and elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 1985.[13]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 PELHAM, Sir Hugh (Reginald Brentnall). Who's Who. 2015 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
  2. 1 2 "Hugh Pelham FMedSci". London: Academy of Medical Sciences. Archived from the original on 2015-12-10.
  3. 1 2 "Professor Hugh R. Pelham Winner of the 1996 KFIP Prize for Science". Archived from the original on 2015-12-10.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Sir Hugh Pelham FMedSci FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived September 25, 2015)
  5. ↑ BIENZ, Dr Mariann, (Lady Pelham). Who's Who. 2015 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
  6. 1 2 Pelham, Hugh (2013). "Building for the future". ELife. 2. doi:10.7554/eLife.00856.
  7. ↑ Pelham, Hugh R. B. (1978). Transcription and Translation in Reticulocyte Lysates. (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge. OCLC 500538683.
  8. ↑ Hugh Pelham's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier. (subscription required)
  9. ↑ Pelham, Hugh R. B.; Jackson, Richard J. (1976). "An Efficient mRNA-Dependent Translation System from Reticulocyte Lysates". European Journal of Biochemistry. 67 (1): 247–256. doi:10.1111/j.1432-1033.1976.tb10656.x. ISSN 0014-2956. PMID 823012.
  10. ↑ Pelham, Hugh R.B. (1986). "Speculations on the functions of the major heat shock and glucose-regulated proteins". Cell. 46 (7): 959–961. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(86)90693-8. ISSN 0092-8674. PMID 2944601.
  11. ↑ Munro, Sean; Pelham, Hugh R.B. (1987). "A C-terminal signal prevents secretion of luminal ER proteins". Cell. 48 (5): 899–907. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(87)90086-9. ISSN 0092-8674. PMID 3545499.
  12. ↑ "Certificate of election EC/1988/30: Pelham, Hugh Reginald Brentnall". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-05-02.
  13. ↑ "EMBO member: Hugh R.B. Pelham". Heidelberg: EMBO.


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