Huggins Lectures will focus on aspects of prostate cancer

One in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and one in eight of these men will die of prostate cancer. The development and treatment of this disease will be explored in a series of free public lectures at the University, beginning Saturday, Jan. 15.

The lectures will review essential aspects of cancer biology, describe principles of environmental toxins and heredity in cancer, unravel novel technologies that enable scientists to analyze and manipulate genes and proteins, and provide information on new treatments targeted to properties of cancer cells.

This series of eight lectures, titled “Everything You Need to Know About Prostate Cancer: Basic Research, Causes, Diagnosis and Treatment,” will be held Saturday mornings from 11 a.m. to noon from Jan. 15 through March 5, in Room 106 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center at 5720 S. Ellis Ave. Donald Vander Griend, a postdoctoral fellow in the Surgery/Urology Section, will deliver the lectures.

This is the third annual lecture series intended to make science accessible to a general audience and convey new discoveries in the biological sciences.

The lectures are named for Charles B. Huggins, the first director of the University’s Ben May Institute for Cancer Research, who received the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work published in 1941, which showed deprivation of testosterone can halt prostate cancer.

All of the lectures are free and open to the public, and more information is available by phoning (773) 702-3940.