School Notes: School of Medicine
January/February 2012

Medical student first to receive new scholarship

Jeffrey Low, of the Class of 2015, is the first recipient of the Donald S. Baim ’75MD Scholarship, established by Boston Scientific Corporation in February 2011 with a $1.7 million endowment. The scholarship honors Baim, an interventional cardiology pioneer who served as Boston Scientific’s chief medical and scientific officer from 2006 until his death in 2009. The Baim scholarship will be awarded each year to an incoming Yale medical student according to both financial need and intellectual and clinical drive, and covers half of his or her tuition for four years. According to a press release, Low received the scholarship based on his “demonstrated pursuits in innovation, invention, and blending business and technology with a grounded interest in clinical medicine and biomedical science.”

Yale chemist named Packard Fellow

Seth B. Herzon, assistant professor of chemistry, has been named a 2011 Packard Fellow. The fellowship was established in 1988 by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to support early career scientists in the physical sciences and engineering, and will support work in Herzon’s laboratory, which is focused on two areas of research. The first involves natural products synthesis, finding ways to recreate useful complex molecules produced in nature in the laboratory. The second research area is organometallic chemistry and the development of new catalytic reactions.

Looking at a virus-detecting RIG

Viruses ranging from common influenza to hepatitis C rely on strands of RNA to infect human cells and spread their genetic information. Yale researchers have now made a step toward understanding how the human immune system recognizes viral RNA strands to mount an immune response, work that could reveal new ways to target such viruses with drugs. Scientists knew that a protein called RIG-I binds to viral RNA that has entered a human cell and alerts the cell of its presence. As reported in the October 14 issue of Cell, the Yale research team discovered that when bound to dsRNA, RIG-I undergoes a dramatic change in shape, in which one section of the protein folds out to make room for the RNA. The authors write that their work on RIG-I’s structure “reveals multiple strategies for therapeutic design.”