As of 1980, the society invites a high profile speaker in biochemistry who conducts a lecturing tour touching several Dutch universities. The list of previous invitees includes many subsequent Nobel Prize winners.      

Speaker of the year 2012: Peter G. Schultz 

Peter G. Schultz graduated from Caltech in 1979 (summa cum laude) and continued there for his doctoral degree (in 1984).  After a postdoctoral year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Professor of Chemistry, a Principal Investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  He moved to The Scripps Research Institute in 1999 where he is currently the Scripps Professor of Chemistry.  Schultz’s contributions to science include: (1) the discovery of catalytic antibodies, and their use to study fundamental mechanisms of biological catalysis and the evolution of binding and catalytic function; (2) the development and application of methods to add new building blocks (beyond the common twenty amino acids) to the genetic codes of prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms; and (3) the development and application of molecular diversity technologies to problems in chemistry, biology and medicine, including the generation of combinatorial materials libraries and the use of chemical, genomic and protein libraries to identify and characterize molecules and genes related to regenerative medicine and orphan and neglected diseases.  Schultz also established the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation  in 1999 in La Jolla (and served as its Director until 2010), which develops and applies state of the art high throughput chemical, proteomics, genomics and informatics technologies to the identification of novel genes and biological processes, as well as the development of new human therapeutics for cancer, immune, metabolic, cardiovascular and infectious disease.  Schultz is the author of ~500 scientific publications, has trained over 300 coworkers and has received numerous awards including the Alan T. Waterman Award, NSF (1988), the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry (1990), the U.C. Berkeley College of Chemistry Teaching Award (1992), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (1994), the Paul Erhlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Award (2002), and the ACS Arthur C. Cope Award (2006).  Professor Schultz is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (1993) and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (1998).  He is active on many editorial and scientific advisory boards and is a founder of Affymax Research Institute, Symyx Technologies, Syrrx, Kalypsys, Phenomix, Ilypsa, Ambrx, Wildcat Discovery Technologies, and Ardelyx, which have pioneered the application of molecular diversity technologies to challenges in energy, materials and human health.

Prof. Schultz will present his lecture “Synthesis at the interface of Chemistry and Biology” at three locations:

Monday May 21th 16.00-17.00                    University of Leiden

Lecture theater C1, Leiden Institute of Chemistry, Einsteinweg 55, 2333 CC Leiden

Host: Prof. Marcellus Ubbink (m.ubbink@chem.leidenuniv.nl)

Tuesday May 22nd, 16.00-17.00                 Eindhoven University of Technology

Helix building, collegezaal 1                                  

Host: Dr. Maarten Merkx (m.merkx@tue.nl)

Wednesday May 23rd, 16.00-17.00            University of Groningen                            

Bernoulliborg V 5161.0105, Zernike complex

Host: Prof. Arnold Driessen (a.j.m.driessen@rug.nl)