Thanks to the efforts of Charles Lichtman ’62, Upper School science instructors Laura Murray and Phil Titus, department chair, took students to tour the research labs and the crystallography center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). They were also able to tour Lichtman’s company’s facilities at Southern Biotech.
Lichtman set up the tour for the Darlington group with Larry Delucas O.D., PhD., who is the director of the Crystallography Lab at UAB. “What a facility,” Murray said.
The lab is using the information from the human genome project to identy the location of genes that code for the production of particular human proteins. The scientists grow crystals of these proteins that are used to study their three-dimensional structure. This helps them to identify active sites of the proteins. Then, chemicals can be designed to disarm these active sites, in the case of caners and viruses, for example. Delucas was an astronaut on one of the shuttles and conducted protein studies in space. According to Murray, his labs have the most up-to-date equipment available to speed up the identification process of proteins, a process that used to take years.
“Charles Lichtman was wonderful to set this all up for us,” Murray said. “He is quite the entrepreneur.” Lichtman’s company makes antibodies that are used by pharmecutical companies all over the world.
