Dr. Paul Talalay
Dr. Paul Talalay, the John Jacob Abel Distinguished Service Professor of Pharmacology, director of the Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, and founder of the Brassica Chemoprevention Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, will be the first Irving Weinstein Visiting Professor in Nutrition and Disease at Weill Cornell. He will be the guest of Weill Cornell's Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, and will present the featured Irving Weinstein Visiting Professor Lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 3, at 5 p.m. in Uris Auditorium. His topic will be "How Phytochemicals Fight Cancer."
Dr. Talalay has devoted his career to cancer research, focusing his efforts on achieving early protection against cell damage. A pioneer in the field of chemoprotective research strategies, Dr. Talalay, with his associates at Johns Hopkins, devised simple cell culture methods for detecting phytochemicals which appear to boost enzymes that detoxify carcinogens in the body. This work led to the isolation of sulforaphane—found in broccoli—as a potent inducer of detoxifying phase-2 enzymes. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (1992), these findings attracted worldwide attention as a major breakthrough in understanding the potential link between cruciferous vegetable consumption and reduced cancer risk.
The Weinstein Visiting Professorship was established with an endowment gift from the Irving Weinstein Foundation in New York.