Former Nobel Laureate and MIT Professor Phillip A. Sharp, Ph.D., will examine The Biology and Medical Promise of Small RNAs during the Pathology's annual Paulette Shirey Pritchett Endowed Lecture 2 p.m., Monday, Sept. 8 in Spain Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Sharp won the 1993 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of RNA splicing in 1977. This work provided one of the first indications of the startling phenomenon of "discontinuous genes" in mammalian cells. The discovery that genes contain nonsense segments that are edited out by cells in the course of using genetic information is important in understanding the genetic causes of cancer and other diseases.

Sharp, professor at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, has authored more than 350 scientific papers. He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees, and has served on many advisory boards for the government, academic institutions, scientific societies and companies.

He is elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.