Dennis Selkoe, MD, Vincent and Stella Coates Professor of Neurologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School, will be the final speaker in the 2010 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Laureate Lecture Series.
His lecture, titled “The Seventh Age of Man: Solving Alzheimer’s Disease,” will take place at noon on Wednesday, November 3, in Scaife Hall, Auditorium 6.

As one of the world’s foremost researchers in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Selkoe has devoted his entire scientific career to understanding the molecular and genetic basis of this devastating neurodegenerative disorder.  Selkoe’s first major breakthrough came in 1982 when he and his coworkers developed a method to isolate and purify the neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques that are the hallmark brain lesions of AD. A decade later, he stunned the AD research world with his discovery that, contrary to widely held assumptions, amyloid protein is a normal product of cellular metabolism throughout life in humans and other mammals. Together, these findings led  Selkoe to formulate a key idea about AD pathogenesis—the amyloid hypothesis—in which cerebral accumulation of amyloid protein in AD represents an exaggeration of a normal metabolic process; and amyloid deposits are an early, invariant, and necessary step in the origins of both inherited and sporadic forms of AD. The amyloid hypothesis has since been borne out by the continued work of Selkoe and others and has spurred the development of amyloid-secreting cell culture systems for the identification and screening of pharmacotherapeutic compounds that inhibit amyloid production or enhance its clearance.

Selkoe earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his medical degree from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. After a medicine internship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and an initial period of research training at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, he completed his neurology residency at the Peter Bent Brigham, Children’s, and Beth Israel Hospitals in Boston and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. He has spent his entire career in the Department of Neuroscience at Harvard, co-directs the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and since 2000 has been the Vincent and Stella Coates Professor of Neurologic Diseases.
Selkoe is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Potamkin Prize from the American Academy of Neurology (shared with George G. Glenner, MD), the Metropolitan Life Foundation Award for Medical Research, a MERIT award from the National Institute on Aging, the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in Alzheimer’s Disease Research from the Alzheimer’s Association. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.