TITLE: "The Physics of Sickle Cell Disease"

SPEAKER: Professor Frank Ferrone,

TIME: Thursday Sept. 2, 2004 at 4 PM

PLACE: George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)

Sickle cell disease is caused by a genetic mutation that permits hemoglobin molecules to associate, contrary to their normal state in the red blood cell. Linus Pauling labelled this the first molecular disease, and for the past 55 years it has provided a fertile testing ground for the applications of physical understanding to biological systems. In this talk I will give a brief overview of the physical principles that underlie this phenomenon, and which appear to apply to other pathological association processes such as Alzheimer's disease and Mad Cow disease. Perhaps most striking among these principles is that center of mass vibrations of the molecules (taken as simple hard spheres) provide a substantial entropic contribution to stability and the rates of association, and explain why protein crystals form slowly while polymers can form quickly.

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