On the afternoon of November 2, Professor Randy Schekman, a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and member of the National Academy of Science, from the University of California, Berkeley, was invited to give a lecture entitled Sorting and secretion of small RNAs in exosomes to Beihang teachers and students at the Conference Center of New Main Building. It is an important part of the 18th Awarding Program for Future Scientists.

In the lecture, Randy Schekman adopted the latest methods in biology and a variety of analytical techniques to expound the classification and secretion of microRNAs in exosomes. He also encouraged students to get rid of the constraint of focusing partially on the impact factors of academic journals and do scientific research independently. In the question-and-answer session, the teachers and students had a dialogue with the international academic master, who answered all the questions in detail. The crowded conference room was taken over by a light and vibrant atmosphere throughout the whole lecture. After the session, many students even went to the front of the stage to have further discussions with Professor Randy Schekman.

Randy Schekman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1928. He received a BS in Molecular Sciences from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1971. He received a PhD in 1975 from Stanford University for research on DNA replication working with Arthur Kornberg who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959. After joining the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1994. Since 1991, he has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He was the former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. In 2002, Schekman received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University along with James Rothman for their discovery of cellular membrane trafficking. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking.

Reported by Xie Qin

Edited by Jia Aiping

Reviewed by Wang Xiaofeng

Translated by Lu Baihui