Earl P. Benditt Endowed Lectureship
The Earl P. Benditt Lectureship series is dedicated to the memory and scientific legacy of Dr. Earl P. Benditt, Professor and Chair, Department of Pathology, 1957-1981.
Earl P. Benditt, M.D.
Professor and Chair, 1957-1981
Dr. Earl Benditt died on May 27, 1996. In 1986 Dr. Benditt became an Emeritus Professor after 29 years of dedicated service to the Department, having served as Chairman from 1957 to 1981. He continued to work in his laboratory and was a Distinguished Physician at the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center from 1988 to 19993. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Benditt came to the University of Washington in 1957, after completing post-doctoral training, and joining the faculty at the University of Chicago.
As chairman of a young department, Dr. Benditt quickly moved to build a faculty primarily dedicated to research and teaching. In a few years the clinical activities of the Department were consolidated at the University Medical Center and a UW-based residency program was launched. The department flourished, incorporating and utilizing modern biological techniques to investigate the pathogenesis of human disease. A Ph.D. program in Experimental Pathology was established, which became a model for many programs in the United States and abroad.
In 1975 Dr. Benditt was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He received the Rous Whipple Award (1980) and the Gold Headed Cane Award (1984) from the American Association of Pathologists. In 1989 he received the Distinguished Pathologist Award from the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology. He was the President of the American Society for Experimental Pathology from 1975-1976, serving on numerous study sections for the National Institute of Health as well as many committees and councils.
Dr. Benditt’s creative and critical approach to science charted the course for the development of academic pathology.
Past Lectureships
Date: November 30, 2007
Speaker: Gwendalyn Randolph, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Gene And Cell Medicine
Associate Professor, Center For Immunobiology
Mount Sinai Medical Center
Lecture Title: “Where Do the Cells of the Atherosclerotic Plaque Come from and Where Do They Go”
Dr. Gwen Randolph, associate professor, Department of Gene and Cell Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, will present UW Medicine Pathology’s 11th Annual Earl P. Benditt Endowed Lectureship, 4 p.m., Friday, Nov. 30, in the University of Washington (UW) Health Sciences Center, Turner Auditorium Room D-209. Randolph’s presentation is entitled “Where Do the Cells of the Atherosclerotic Plaque Come from and Where Do They Go.” The lecture is free and open to public.
Randolph has pioneered the interface between two fields – immunology and vascular biology. Her work began as a Ph.D. student in the lab of Dr. Marie Furie at the Rockefeller University as well as of Drs. William Muller and Ralph Steinman. They studied interactions of monocytes with the lining of blood vessels. During these years, Randolph observed that monocyte-derived cells could emigrate into atherosclerotic plaques and then differentiate into dendritic cells.
The major input has come from her discovery that these dendritic cells migrate from the plaque to regional lymph nodes and that these migrating dendritic cells actually can deplete lipid from the plaque.
Why is this important?
First, it provides a totally new idea of how atherosclerotic lesions may be able to regress. Second, it opens a new frontier because it offers a route for even a small atherosclerotic lesion to use the dendritic cells to communicate with the immune system. This finding raises the possibility that immune mechanisms are essential to this disease.
To study these phenomena, Randolph developed elegant new technologies for tracing monocyte movements into and out of tissues. Circulating monocytes were labeled with fluorescent latex particles. The label is carried into plaques, persists beyond death of the labeled infiltrating cell. Loss of label cannot be ascribed to death of monocyte-derived cells so must imply mobilization of labeled cells from plaques. Thus, this technique allows us to address outstanding questions in the field regarding the possibility that the cells cannot emigrate from plaques during disease progression, in contrast to the normal mobilization of monocyte-derived cells from resolving acute inflammatory reactions, and the possibility that they alternatively die and integrate into necrotic areas.
Recently she has used the method to study the effects of niacin supplementation at high doses. This treatment is known to be cardioprotective. Niacin treatment for 15 days was able to mobilize monocyte-derived cells from plaques. Thus, at least one atheroprotective therapy, that involving high-dose niacin, rescues phagocytes derived from circulating monocytes from death and incorporation into structures that promote plaque instability, and instead causes such cells to leave lesions altogether. Ongoing studies are investigating whether other atheroprotective or potentially regressive therapies mobilize only subsets of monocytes.
Date: February 22, 2006
Speaker: Napoleone Ferrara, M.D.; Genentech Fellow, Department of Molecular Oncology at Genentech, Inc.
Lecture Title: “VEGF: From Bench to Bedside”
Date: April 6, 2005
Speaker: Susan Lindquist, Ph.D.; Director of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lecture Title: “Modeling Neurogeneration in Yeast”
Date: May 4, 2004
Speaker: Catherine Verfaillie, M.D.; Director, Stem Cell Institute, University of Minnesota
Lecture Title: “Greater Potency of Adult Stem Cells: Possible Mechanisms and Uses”
Date: January 15, 2003
Speaker: Richard Klausner, M.D.; Executive Director, Global Health Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Lecture Title: “Molecular Medicine in the Post Genome Era”
Date: January 10, 2002
Speaker: David R. Cox, M.D., Ph.D.; Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Genetics, Co-director, Stanford Genome Center
School Affiliation: Stanford University
Lecture Title: “Genetics in Everyday Life”
Date: January 10, 2001
Speaker: Dr. Irving L. Weissman
School Affiliation: Stanford University
Lecture Title: No Information
Date: December 16, 1999
Speaker: Janet Rowley, M.D., D.Sc.(Hon.); Blum-Riese Distinguished Service, Professor of Medicine & Molecular Genetics
School Affiliation: University of Chicago
Lecture Title: “Chromosome Translocations: Dangerous Liaisons”
Date: November 17, 1998
Speaker: Zena Werb, Ph.D.; Professor, Department of Anatomy
School Affiliation: University of California, San Francisco
Lecture Title: “Angiogenesis: Parallels in Development and Disease”
Date: November 13, 1997
Speaker: Alfred G. Knudson, M.D., Ph.D.; Senior Member, Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase Center
Lecture Title: “Germinal Somatic Mutations in the Origin of Cancer”
Date: 1996
Speaker: Dr. John Q. Trojanowski
School Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Lecture Title: No information available