Anna Marie Skalka on 2003 CSHL Meeting: The Biology of DNA
  Anna Marie Skalka     Biography    
Recorded: 01 Mar 2003

It is a fantastic meeting. For me having grown up through this whole experience it’s a like having a little family reunion. It’s wonderful! And it’s unusual in that there’s good science and there’s also wonderful history. And it’s been a very, very good meeting.

Anna Marie Skalka, microbiologist, molecular biologist and geneticist is Senior Vice President for Basic Science and director of the Institute for Cancer Research at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. She completed her Ph.D. at New York University Medical School in 1964 and came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to continue her graduate work on bacteriophage under Al Hershey. In 1969 she left for the Roche Institute for Molecular Biology and eventually she turned her attention to retroviruses.

At Fox Chase Medical Center, Skalka studies molecular aspects of retroviral replication and hopes to uncover mechanisms of retroviral DNA integration. She has become interested in virally coded integrase, which catalyzes the integration of retroviral DNA into the host cell’s genome. Considering that stable integration of viral DNA into the host cell genome is essential for replication of retroviruses, her studies are important in developing antiviral drugs to treat AIDS.