Charles Sherr on Biology in the Electronic Age
  Charles Sherr     Biography    
Recorded: 15 Jun 2002

… I do think its becoming much more electronic. I mean, if you ask me how much time did I spend in the library twenty years ago and how much time do I spend there today, I’ll almost never have to go to the library. I just go on, pull papers out of PubMed; you know, print them on my printer. But I’m still getting hard copies of the journals at home and I have not myself gotten to the point where I’m willing to give up my journal subscription for an on-line subscription because I think something about receiving the journal forces me to go through the entire table of contents and allows me some time in sort of getting around to the paper or two papers in that issue that I think I want to read. So, you know, I don’t have to be wired up to do it. I can be—it can be eleven at night and I can be, you know, pick the journal off the night table and read a paper or two at my leisure. So I think there’s some benefit having hard copies of the information.

Charles Sherr earned his joint M.D./Ph.D. degree from New York University in 1973. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator based at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. His work focuses on retroviral oncogenes, growth factors and their receptors, and cell cycle control. In 1991, Sherr's laboratory discovered the mammalian D-type G1 cyclins and went on to identify the cyclin-dependent kinases with which they associate, as well as a series of polypeptide inhibitors that negatively regulate their activities.

Sherr is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has won numerous awards and is the author of more than 235 scientific articles. He joined the National Cancer Institute in 1973, becoming a member of the NIH staff in 1975 and head of the viral pathology section, Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention, in 1977. In 1983, he relocated to St. Jude. Sherr is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.