Famous Yale Immunologist to be Honored with Symposium

The “Richard K. Gershon Symposium on Suppressor T Cells,” a day of presentations and discussions by nine of the most distinguished researchers in immunology, will be held on November 17 in the Anlyan Center Auditorium at Yale School of Medicine.

Each year there is an annual funded Gershon Lecture. This year the Gershon family and the Department of Immunobiology at Yale will honor the 20th year of his passing. It has been slightly more than 30 years since his seminal discovery of suppressor T cells, now recognized to be important in cancer, autoimmunity, allergies and infectious diseases.

The distinguished speakers are international leaders in the current fields of medical research investigating the role of suppressor T cells in various diseases.

Gershon’s discoveries of suppressor T cells in the early 1970’s ignited a new field of immunology for which he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, US.

He attended Harvard College and received his medical degree from Yale School of Medicine. He worked in the Department of Pathology where he became Professor and founded the Howard Hughes Cellular Immunology Unit at Yale.

This symposium will be of particular interest to all faculty and students in the biological and medical sciences for its historical basis and medical timeliness.

A complete listing of the speakers and their topics is at: http://info.med.yale.edu/immuno/

The symposium is free, and open to the public. Please, call Mary Jane Chicoski at 785-7122 or e-mail maryjane.chicoski@yale.edu to register.