David J. Haas, part 1: Cryo-cooling Protein Crystals: The First 52 Years

www.ibiology.org/techniques/cryocrystallography

Dr. David Haas shares the story behind his invention of macromolecular cryocrystallography.

In his postdoctoral studies, David Haas set out to reduce radiation damage to protein crystals during X-ray crystallography. In 1970, he published a paper on his invention of macromolecular cryocrystallography - freezing crystals to extend their lifetime in the X-ray beam. The widespread use of the synchrotron beginning in the 1970s made cryo-cooling essential, and today nearly all protein crystal structures deposited in the international Protein Data Bank use this method. In his second presentation, Haas shares an example of how cryocrystallography has aided structure-based drug design.

Speaker Biography:
David Haas was born in Buffalo NY, and raised in a Texas farming community near the Mexican border. He graduated from the University of Buffalo (now SUNY at Buffalo) in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in physics, and pursued his PhD studies in the lab of David Harker at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, where he studied protein crystallography. Haas pursued postdoctoral research at The Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Purdue University, where he developed a method to extend the lifetime of protein crystals during X-ray crystallography. After finishing his postdoctoral work, Haas went into industry, where he worked for Philips Electronic Instruments and TEMTEC. In 2015 he became aware of his significant contribution to scientific research and has been delivering lectures on his experience to the structural biology community since then.