Lady Margaret Lecture - 'How lessons from frogs can mend a broken heart'

The lecture will be given by Professor Sir James Smith, Emeritus Scientist at the Francis Crick Institute and President of the Zoological Society of London. 

On leaving Christ’s Jim Smith began his career as a developmental biologist, studying the mechanisms by which cells in the embryo come to form the right kind of specialised tissue or organ in the right place. He focussed on the development of the frog Xenopus laevis, where he identified some of the protein signals that direct cell differentiation. He showed that these signals act in a concentration-dependent fashion, and he investigated their modes of action, identifying the genes that they ‘turn on’ and showing that the products of these genes regulate the expression of others. It proved that the lessons learned from the developing frog embryo also applied to human stem cells, and with his colleague Dr Andreia Bernardo, Jim has helped show how human stem cells can be directed to form homogeneous populations of muscle cells specific to the left ventricle of the heart. He hopes these cells will be of use in drug screening and regenerative medicine.