Scientists and lay people alike crowded into downtown Santa Barbara’s New Vic Theater on Wednesday, August 19, for the 60th Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Public Lecture, delivered by Nobel laureate Randy Schekman. In a talk titled “How Cells Package and Traffic Proteins for Export,” the UC-Berkeley professor, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine, discussed his life work as well as the issues he sees plaguing modern scientific journals.
After kicking off the lecture with his path into the world of science as well as a quick overview of cell biology, the biochemist launched into how he ultimately came to answer the question central to his decades-long career: What are the mechanics by which cells transport vesicles throughout the cell, including to the outside of the cell’s membrane?
Peppering his lecture with humor, Schekman enthusiastically walked his audience through a dense cell biology lesson. Vesicles — packet-like membranes encasing proteins — were known to scuttle through the cells of everything from yeast to the human brain, performing certain functions depending on their contents and often secreting from the cell entirely to perform other functions. By tweaking the genes of yeast cells in the lab, Schekman was able to begin piecing together the molecular mechanisms and chemical catalysts behind the protein-trafficking process, which enable everything from insulin production to the brain’s ability to generate muscle movement.