A Conversation with Susan Lindquist
- Executive Editor, CSH Perspectives and CSH Protocols
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Susan Lindquist is a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Richard Sever:You work on yeast, but also on Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease and various other conditions. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are complex neurological conditions that affect multicellular organisms with nerves. Yeast is a single-celled organism with no nerves, so what's the logic behind that?
Dr. Lindquist:Sounds crazy, doesn't it? And believe me, we didn't have an easy time of it in the beginning. It was based upon the fact that I've been working on the protein folding problem for a very long time. And it's a problem that's universal amongst all living organisms. There are so many aspects of protein folding–protein trafficking, protein homeostasis—that are very highly conserved. So I thought it was worth a try.
We really have to solve these problems as their …
