New findings in the role of chemicals in interactions among all organisms will be reported and discussed at Cornell April 13 and 14 when the Jill and Ken Iscol Distinguished Environmental Lecture Series brings together four leaders in the emerging field of chemical ecology.
Lectures are free and open to the public. The Iscol program recognizes scholarship on the frontiers of scientific inquiry and addresses issues of paramount importantance to humankind.
·May R. Berenbaum, professor and chair of entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, opens the series this year, beginning at 3 p.m. Thursday, April 13, in Statler Auditorium, with her observations on chemicals that plants produce, "Phytochemicals: Plant Sex, Human Drugs and Insect Rock and Roll."
A specialist in the chemical interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants, Berenbaum is the author of three books, numerous scientific articles and a contributor to popular-science publications. The Ph.D. graduate of Cornell also is known as the originator of Illinois' Insect Fear Film Festival.
·Thomas Eisner, Cornell's Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology, and Jerrold Meinwald, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 13, in Statler Auditorium on "The Chemical Ways of Nature."
Long-time collaborators, Eisner and Meinwald are internationally recognized as pioneers in the field of chemical ecology whose discoveries have advanced the search for new medicinals, agrochemicals and other useful substances from nature.
A post-lecture reception is planned from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Statler Auditorium foyer.
·Ian T. Baldwin, director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, will speak at 4 p.m. Friday, April 14, in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall, on "Finding and Using the Genetic Basis of the Ecological Sophistication of Plants: Another Example of the 'Value' of Nature?"
Baldwin uses biochemical and molecular biological techniques to investigate changes in the plant-defense production of alkaloids and other chemicals, as well as changes in gene expression in host plants, when plants are attacked by herbivorous insects.
Also a Cornell doctoral graduate, Baldwin now is on leave from his post as professor of chemical ecology of plant-animal interactions at the University of Buffalo.
Chemical ecology, as explained by Meinwald and Eisner in a joint presentation to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994, is a way of interpreting a ubiquitous type of communication that our eyes and ears often miss.
"All organisms engender chemical signals," the chemical ecologists said, "and all, in their respective ways, respond to the chemical emissions of others. The result is a vast communicative interplay, fundamental to the fabric of life."
The Iscol Distinguished Environmental Lectures are presented annually by the Cornell Center for the Environment. Ken Iscol is a 1960 graduate of Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and founder of Tri-Star Communications Corp. He is a member of the Cornell University Council, a founding advisory member of the Center for the Environment, and he helped establish a course in the ILR School, "Human Resources Management for Small Business," in which alumni who run small businesses share experienes with students and analyze real-life problems.
Last year's Iscol lecturer was F. Sherwood Rowland, the University of California at Irvine scientist who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for linking chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions to ozone-layer depletion.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |