On Thursday, December 1, 2022, Dr. Robert M. Stroud, Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, will give the Inaugural Richard E. Dickerson Biochemistry Lecture titled “Caught in the Act! – Building the Wall!”. The lecture will be held in Boyer Hall 159 and online via Zoom.

This lecture series honors Professor Emeritus Richard Dickerson, a giant in structural biology. A new endowment was recently established for the series to provide resources for an enriched biochemistry seminar series at UCLA, which will augment the ability of UCLA’s Biochemistry Division to continue its tradition of bringing the best scientific minds to campus to speak and interact with our faculty and students to enrich our teaching and research programs.

We are incredibly grateful to our generous donors who made this endowment possible. Join us in supporting the biochemistry seminar series! Contributions can be made directly via the online site or by check using the instructions below.

The Zoom i.d. can be obtained from Marla Gonzalez, marla@chem.ucla.edu.

About Richard E. Dickerson (1931-)

Professor Richard E. Dickerson, a native of Illinois, received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1953 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1957, followed by two post-doctoral fellowships, first at Leeds University and then at Cambridge University. Dickerson began his academic career in 1959 as an assistant professor of physical chemistry at the University of Illinois. In 1963 he moved to the California Institute of Technology. In 1981, Professor David Eisenberg, who had been a postdoctoral fellow of Dickerson’s at CalTech, spearheaded a successful effort to lure Dickerson to UCLA where he went on to hold a joint appointment in the Division of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Dickerson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. He formally retired in 2004 and remains active in writing about science.

Since the beginning of his career, Dickerson’s research in structural biology has been ground-breaking. As a postdoc at the University of Cambridge (under John C. Kendrew) he recorded the data and computed the Fourier map for the 2.0A structure of myoglobin, the first atomic structure of a protein.As a professor at the University of Illinois, Dickerson produced the famous “sausage” diagram of myoglobin, the basis for all future representations of atomic structures of proteins (through Jane Richardson and Irving Geis and then computer drawings).

As a professor of physical chemistry at the Caltech, Dickerson’s structural study of cytochrome c was expanded into a beautiful exposition of molecular evolution, exemplified by the mosaic (see above) on the wall outside the main seminar room in Boyer Hall at UCLA.

At UCLA, Dickerson changed his focus to DNA and determined the first atomic structure of the B form of DNA. Watson was quoted as saying that this structure convinced him for the first time that the Watson-Crick structure was correct!

Dickerson also made major contributions to the UCLA bioscience community following Professor Paul Boyer as the Director of the Molecular Biology Institute from 1983-1994. His term was characterized by expanding the membership through the campus and especially the medical school, and starting the famous Tuesday noon research lunch seminars.

Dickerson’s energy was also reflected in his non-research writings. In 2005, he wrote “Present at the Flood: How Structural Molecular Biology Came About”; in 2009 a history of the Molecular Biology Institute “The Making of an Institute: The MBI at UCLA – 1960-1978”.

How to Contribute to Richard E. Dickerson Biochemistry Seminar Fund

Contributions can be made directly via the online site or by check to the “UCLA Foundation” at the following address: The UCLA Foundation, PO Box 7145, Pasadena, CA 91109-9903.

If you are donating by check, please make sure that the name and fund number is on the check “The Richard E. Dickerson Biochemistry Seminar Fund #61246O”. The last character in the fund number is the letter “O”, not the number zero.

Further details on this fundraising effort can be obtained from Steven Clarke, David Eisenberg, or Joseph Loo, (clarke@mbi.ucla.edu; david@mbi.ucla.edu; jloo@chem.ucla.edu).