Office of Public Information Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 (212) 854-5573
Carol L. Prives, a virologist who has made major contributions to understanding the molecular biology of cancer, has been named Da Costa Professor of Biology at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1979.
Professor Prives strives to understand the process that results in disordered cell growth, now thought to begin as a result of changes in a cell's DNA. Such mutations are caused by factors such as chemical carcinogens, irradiation and viruses. In the last half-dozen years, scientists have discovered that a particular human gene, p53, suppresses tumors by preventing the stabilization of damaged DNA. About half of all cancer patients show mutations in this important gene, and biomedical researchers believe such mutations both remove a mechanism that protects the body against cancer and add a cancer-causing one. Science magazine noted the advances by naming p53 its "Molecule of the Year" for 1993.
Professor Prives considers research on the protein manufactured by the p53 gene, in both its normal and mutant variants, vital to understanding the process that results in disordered cell growth. She and others have demonstrated that the p53 protein binds to DNA and can activate that blueprint molecule's crucial transcription function, in which messenger RNA molecules carry information on genetic traits from a cell's nucleus to its cytoplasm.
The Columbia virologist is examining how DNA binding in the mutant p53 protein differs from the normal protein and whether normal binding could be restored to mutant proteins. Her research team is also testing the important hypothesis that p53 is directly involved in repairing damaged DNA. Professor Prives also studies the molecular biology of the cell cycle and DNA replication.
Born in Montreal, Professor Prives received both the B.Sc. degree, first class honors, and the Ph.D., both in biochemistry, from McGill University. In 1968, she accepted a postdoctoral appointment at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and followed that work in 1971 with a senior postdoctoral appointment in biochemistry at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. She served as assistant professor, then associate professor, at the institute from 1974 to 1982, the last two years on a leave of absence.
She was appointed associate professor at Columbia in 1979 and professor in 1987. Professor Prives sits on several research review panels, among them the NIH's Experimental Virology Study Section, of which she is chairman-elect. She has served on the editorial boards of several journals in the life sciences and is editor of the Journal on Virology. She lists 94 publications in refereed journals.
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