Stanford Report, June 7, 2006

Stocker Lecture to discuss typhoid

The first of an annual series of talks in honor of the late Bruce Stocker, MD, former professor of microbiology and immunology, will be presented June 9 at noon in Munzer Auditorium in the Beckman Center.

Stocker was at Stanford for 38 years, until his passing in 2004 at the age of 87. The focus of his research was understanding the physiologic and genetic processes of the Salmonella group of bacteria, which cause diseases including Typhoid fever, with the goal of developing safer, more effective vaccines. His groundbreaking approach was to engineer mutant strains of bacteria that were unable to grow within the host—thus minimizing the risk of vaccine-induced infections developing—but whose presence was still sufficient to prompt the immune system to produce antibodies against the bacteria.

The first annual Bruce Stocker Lecture will be presented by Gordon Dougan, PhD, speaking on "The genetics of typhoid: Past, current and future approaches." Dougan is professor and principal research fellow at the Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridgeshire in England.