Stanford Biochemist Named MacArthur Fellow

Stanford biochemist Pehr Harbury is among the MacArthur Foundation fellows announced today.

Every year for the past 25 years, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago identifies a select group of thinkers and innovators who receive a grant of $100,000 a year over a five-year period. The details of selection process for the so-called “genius grants” is quite closely held and the funds are disbursed with, the foundation says, no strings attached.

The Harvard-trained Harbury joins an ecclectic list of 25 fellows including a conductor, a fisherman/scientist, a rare book specialist, a filmaker, and an Bronx social activist.

Harbury, 40, engages in protein research, investigating the structure, activity, and synthesis of proteins for application in drugs discovery. He has developed a technique called “DNA Display.” [Read his MacArthur profile. Read about DNA Display.]

According to Hurbury's website at Stanford, his lab's goal [this is highly simplified] is to find ways to achieve the controlled use of polypeptides to design proteins. The site says the lab relies primarily on three tools:

-- (a) the computational engineering of structures at atomic resolution, made possible by the advent of classical molecular mechanics potentials;
-- (b) biophysical characterization of peptide proteins composed from an expanded amino acid alphabet;
-- (c) the generation and screening of combinatorial libraries, both in vivo using bacterial screens and sexual PCR and in vitro by synthesis of compounds on solid support.

Thomas H. Maugh II of the Los Angeles Times writes that the pharmaceutical industry is interested in [Harbury's] technique, but will not provide funding without agreements that would, among other things, prevent him from publishing the results, he said. "Their restrictions are not workable," Harbury told the newspaper.

As a consequence, Harbury, 40, said he has spent the last couple of years writing grant proposals and seeking other funding sources with little success. "From that perspective, [the MacArthur] money is huge. It's very good timing on their part," the LA Times reported.