Alice S. Huang

At 85 years old, Alice S. Huang physical status not available right now. We will update Alice S. Huang's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Alice Huang's research focused on defective interfering particles (DIPs) which can be utilized to combat viruses. DIPs are composed of viral structural proteins and sets of DNA or RNA which are incomplete. These DIPs will interfere in replication of the virus because they are reproduced at the expense of a standard viral particle. Alice Huang's work on DIPs has been utilized to combat cancer, HIV, and plant related diseases.

At Johns Hopkins and MIT her work for Robert R. Wagner and future husband David Baltimore was "to purify and characterize interfering viral particles". They studied the inhibition of cellular RNA synthesis by nonreplicating vesicular stomatitis virus, known to infect horses, cattle and swine.

At the time, biologists knew the central dogma to be DNA to RNA to protein, with DNA replication as the way to replicate ones genome. Dr. Huang and Dr. Baltimore unraveled that RNA viruses were different and used RNA polymerase to replicate its RNA genome, but they discovered an enzyme, reverse transcriptase (in a mouse leukemia retrovirus), that converts RNA to DNA (involved in a process now known as reverse transcription). Dr. Baltimore later received the Nobel Prize in 1975 for his discovery.

Huang and Baltimore coauthored a paper with Martha Stampfer titled "Ribonucleic acid synthesis of vesicular stomatitis virus, II. An RNA polymerase in the virion." This paper went on to show that “the virions of vesicular stomatitis virus contain an enzyme that catalyzes the incorporation of ribonucleotides into RNA”.

At Harvard Medical School, Huang continued to study how mutant strains produced by rabies-like virus interfered with further growth of the viral infection. In 1977, she was awarded the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology and Immunology for this research. From 1971 to 1991, Huang taught at Harvard Medical School.

At Harvard, Huang served as coordinator of the Virology Unit at the Channing Laboratories of Infectious Diseases at Boston Medical Center for two years, and as Director of the "Virus-Host Interactions in Cancer" training program (funded by the National Cancer Institute) for fifteen years.

Huang directed the Laboratories of Infectious Diseases at Boston Children's Hospital in 1979, where she studied viral diseases in pediatric patients. At New York University, Dr. Huang participated in a project in science education and received a grant that focused on improving teachers’ preparation and ability to engage students in science exploration and discovery.

Huang is an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences (KGI).

Huang is a former trustee of the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology and a trustee of the Public Agenda. She was pointed a Council Member of the California Council on Science and Technology in 2004, and served for two terms.

Source

• 1977 - Eli Lilly Award in Immunology and Microbiology (from the American Society for Microbiology)
• 1982 - Doctor of Science (Honorary), Wheaton College
• 1987 - Doctor of Science (Honorary), from Mount Holyoke College
• 1991 - Doctor of Science (Honorary), Medical College of Pennsylvania
• 1999 - Achievement Award (from the Chinese-American Faculty Association of Southern California)
• 2001 - the Alice C. Evans Award (from the American Society for Microbiology)
• 2015 - The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Distinguished Alumnus/Alumna Award