The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Lifetime achievement awards for eminent neuroscientists

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Feb 19, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Lifetime achievement awards for eminent neuroscientists

Staff Reporter

IIT-Madras director M.S. Ananth presents the awards

HONOURED: M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT- Madras (second from right), presents the T.S. Srinivasan Centre for Clinical Neurosciences' Lifetime Achievement Award to Nobel Laureate Stanley Prusiner in Chennai on Sunday. TVS Motor Company CMD Venu Srinivasa n and the centre's founder chairman Krishnamoorthy Srinivas (extreme right), are also in the picture. — PHOTO: S.S. Kumar

CHENNAI: The T.S. Srinivasan Centre for Clinical Neurosciences presented Lifetime Achievement Awards to Nobel Laureate Stanley Prusiner and three other eminent neuroscientists in Chennai on Sunday.

Prof. Prusiner and Professors Charles Warlow, David Bates and Anthony Schapiro have been lecturing at the annual courses in Clinical Neurosciences 2007 organised by the centre over the last two days.

Indian Institute of Technology, Madras director M.S. Ananth presented the awards and TVS Motors chief executive and managing director Venu Srinivasan, son of T.S. Srinivasan in whose memory the centre was established, presided over the function. Mr. Srinivasan hoped that with neuroscience emerging as one of the key frontiers of scientific endeavour, these annual courses would lead to a flourishing neuroscience community in India.

Valuable research

The professors were honoured for their contributions to neuroscience research. While Prof. Prusiner is responsible for ground-breaking research on prions, infectious agents made of proteins which cause spongiform encephalopathy such as that found in Mad Cow disease, Prof. Schapira is interested in mitochondrial disorders.

Prof. Bates is involved in clinical trials of novel therapy for multiple sclerosis, and Prof. Warlow does clinical research on strokes and functional symptoms.

In a lecture on the neurogenetic aspects of prion disease, Prof. Prusiner said that ongoing and future research into the nature and atomic structure of prions could provide insights into the development of neurogenetic Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease as well.

This is important as Alzheimer's is the fourth leading cause of death in developed nations and is spreading through the developing world as better healthcare increases life expectancy. "There's a dementia epidemic. By 2050, we could have more people with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's in China than the entire population of California. I would imagine the same situation will be seen in India," said Prof. Prusiner.

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