Understanding human oxygen sensing: adventures of a physician in science

The maintenance of oxygen homeostasis is a fundamental physiological challenge, inadequate oxygen (hypoxia) being a major component of most human diseases. This Discourse will trace insights into human oxygen homeostasis from the founding work of William Harvey on the circulation of the blood to the molecular elucidation of a system of oxygen sensing that functions to measure oxygen levels in cells and control multiple adaptive responses to hypoxia.

The Discourse will attempt to illustrate and rationalize the unexpected in biological discovery and discuss the interface of discovery science with the development of medical therapeutics.

About our Speaker

Peter J. Ratcliffe, M.D. is a physician scientist who trained as a nephrologist, before founding the hypoxia biology laboratory at Oxford. His laboratory elucidated mechanisms by which human and animal cells sense oxygen levels and transduce these signals to direct adaptive changes in gene expression. For this work he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019.

He holds appointments as Director of Clinical Research at the Francis Crick Institute, London, Director of the Target Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford and is a Distinguished Scholar of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

Respondent: Cormac Taylor MRIA, Professor of Cellular Physiology at the School of Medicine and Medical Science and the Conway Institute, University College Dublin.

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