Telugu man on Obama Ethics Panel

April 11th, 2010

IANS Share Buzz up!Washington, April 10:

The US President, Mr Barack Obama, has named India-born Harvard geneticist, Dr Raju Kucherlapati, whose research focuses on gene mapping, gene modification and cloning disease genes, to a key White House panel on bioethics.

Dr Kucherlapati, 67, who is director emeritus and Paul C. Cabot Professor in the Harvard Medical School department of gene-tics, is among 10 scholars named to the newly created Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

The panel will advise the President on bioethical issues that may emerge from advances in biomedicine and related areas of science and technology.

Dr Kucherlapati, who is also professor in the department of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was the first scientific director of the Harvard Medical School-Partners Healthcare Centre for Genetics and Genomics.

From 1989-2001, he was the Lola and Saul Kramer Professor of molecular genetics and chairman of the department at the Yeshiva University Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

He was previously a professor in the department of genetics at the University of Illinois, College of Medicine. He began his research as an assistant professor in the department of biochemical sciences at Princeton.

Kucherlapati has chaired numerous National Institutes of Health (NIH) committees and served on the US National Advisory Cou-ncil for Human Genome Research and the NCI Mouce Models for Human Cancer Consortium.

Dr Kucherlapati received his BS and MS in biology from universities in India, and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana.