Huggins Lectures will explain human carcinogenesis

Using skin cancer as a model, a new series of free public lectures at the University will describe how tumors develop. The lectures, which begin Saturday, Jan. 17, will illustrate the various events that lead to tumor formation using the biology of the skin, the human body’s largest organ.

Because skin has a distinctive self-renewal capacity, it provides an ideal model for explaining human carcinogenesis. The lectures also will review essential aspects of cancer biology, describe principles of environmental toxins and heredity in cancer, unravel novel technologies that enable the analysis and manipulation of genes and proteins, and discuss new treatments targeted to properties of cancer cells.

This series of eight lectures, titled “Getting Under the Skin of Cancer Development,” will be held Saturday mornings from 11 a.m. to noon from Jan. 17 through March 13 in Room 106 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center at 5720 S. Ellis Ave.

University dermatology resident Mario Lacouture will deliver the lectures. Prior to coming to Chicago, Lacouture earned his medical degree from Javeriana University in Bogotá, Colombia, and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School-Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

This is the second annual lecture series, which is intended to make biological science accessible to a general audience and to convey the excitement of new discoveries in the field.

The lectures are named for Charles Huggins, the first director of the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research and winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work he published in 1941, showing that deprivation of testosterone can halt prostate cancer.

All of the lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, call (773) 834-3899.