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	==Lawsuit for Josephschlessinger.com==		==Lawsuit for Josephschlessinger.com==
	In 2008, <i>www.Josephschlessinger.com</i> was registered and links to court records, transcripts, referencing Schlessinger’s sexual harassment lawsuit (see <i>Personal life</i> above) and the 2006 lawsuit from The Weitzman Institute for Science, where Joseph Schlessinger played a major part in misappropriating, according to the court, research worth $900M dollars in royalties. <ref></ref> <ref></ref> <ref></ref>		In 2008, <i>www.Josephschlessinger.com</i> was registered and it hosted links to court records, transcripts, referencing Schlessinger’s sexual harassment lawsuit (see <i>Personal life</i> above) and the 2006 lawsuit from The Weitzman Institute for Science, where Joseph Schlessinger played a major part in misappropriating, according to the court, research worth $900M dollars in royalties. <ref></ref> <ref></ref> <ref></ref>

	Rather than suing for libel, which would have been a difficult case to sustain, as the website was heavily referenced from public record and major news sites, Dr. Schlessinger took a case to the ], or World Intellectual Property Organization, where he claimed that he owned the commonlaw rights to "josephschlessinger.com". <ref></ref>		Rather than suing for libel, which would have been a difficult case to sustain, as the website was heavily referenced from public record and major news sites, Dr. Schlessinger took a case to the ], or World Intellectual Property Organization, where he claimed that he owned the commonlaw rights to "josephschlessinger.com". <ref></ref>

Revision as of 14:31, 3 November 2009

Joseph Schlessinger, Ph.D. is Chair of the Pharmacology Department at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. His area of research is signaling through tyrosine phosphorylation, which is important in many areas of cellular regulation, especially growth control and cancer. Schlessinger is best known for his pioneering studies that have led to an understanding of the mechanism of transmembrane signaling by receptor tyrosine kinases and how the resulting signals are transmitted within the cell to control cell growth and differentiation.

Education and Training

Schlessinger received his B.Sc. degree in Chemistry and Physics in 1968 (magna cum laude), plus an M.Sc. degree in chemistry (also magna cum laude) in 1970 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in biophysics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1974. From 1974–1976, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Chemistry and Applied Physics at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York (working with Elliot Elson and Watt W. Webb). From 1977–1978, he was a visiting fellow in the immunology branch of the NIH National Cancer Institute.

Academic Positions

Schlessinger was a member of the faculty of the Weizmann Institute from 1978–1991, and was the Ruth and Leonard Simon Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Immunology there from 1985 till 1991. In addition, he was a Research Director for Rorer Biotechnology in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania from 1985-1990. In 1990, he was appointed as the Milton and Helen Kimmelman Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at NYU Medical School. While at NYU School of Medicine, he served as Director of the Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine at NYU Medical Center from 1998–2001 .

He has been the William H. Prusoff Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine since 2001. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and was elected as a Member of the Institute of Medicine in 2005. He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including Cell, Molecular Cell., the Journal of Cell Biology, and the Science magazine 'Science Signaling' journal .

He has also been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Michael Landau Prize (1973), the Sara Leady Prize (1980), the Hestrin Prize (1983) the Levinson Prize (1984), a Ciba-Drew Award (1995), the Antoine Lacassagne Prize (1995), the Taylor Prize (2000), and the Dan David Prize (2006). In 2002, he was granted an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Haifa, and has given named lectures at many institutions, including the Harvey Society (in the 1993-1994 Harvey Lectures series), and the 2006 Keith R. Porter Lecture of the American Society for Cell Biology. In 2009, he was elected as a Member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Publications and Research

According to PubMed, Schlessinger has authored over 450 scientific original and review articles in the area of pharmacology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and structural biology, mostly in the area of tyrosine kinase signaling. Tyrosine kinase signaling plays a critical role in the control of many cellular processes including cell proliferation, differentiation, metabolism, as well as cell survival and migration. Tyrosine kinases play a particularly important role in cancer, and several agents that block their activity are now used as anti-cancer drugs, such as Imatinib, or Gleevec. Among his contributions are the findings that cell surface receptors with tyrosine kinase activity signal across membrane by forming dimers when they bind to their growth factor activators. He discovered this in studies of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). He was also instrumental in understanding how the SH2 domain controls tyrosine kinase signaling by binding to phosphorylated tyrosines in activated receptors. One of the seminal findings in this work was his laboratory's cloning of Grb2 and other Adaptor proteins. Another is the lab's cloning of FRS2, which is critical for signaling by the Fibroblast growth factor receptor. In 2001, he was ranked by the ISI as one of the world's top 30 most cited scientists (across all fields) in the 1990s. . His papers have been cited a total of 76,699 times. A September 2003 article in the UK newspaper 'The Guardian' listed him as number 14 in the "Giants of Science."

Personal life

Schlessinger was born March 26, 1945, in the village of Topusko, now in Croatia, when it was occupied by Nazi Germany. The family moved to Israel in 1948. . He served his compulsory military service with the Golani infantry brigade and was commissioned an officer. As part of his reserve duty he participated in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

He is married to Irit Lax, an Associate Professor in the Pharmacology Department at Yale. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Pharmacology Department at NYU Medical Center. The focus of her research is on the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) receptor. Lax has been working together with Joseph Schlessinger since she was a graduate student in Israel in the early 1980s. They each have two children from a previous marriage.

In 2006, a sexual harassment lawsuit was initiated against Yale University by Schlessinger's former secretary, Mary Beth Garceau. Garceau alleged numerous episodes of harassment by Joseph Schlessinger during her employment at Yale, ,,,. and claimed that Yale University failed to act upon her frequent complaints, thus causing Garceau to resign. The case was settled out of court in mid-2007, and the terms of the settlement were not publicly disclosed.

Lawsuit for Josephschlessinger.com

In 2008, www.Josephschlessinger.com was registered and it hosted links to court records, transcripts, referencing Schlessinger’s sexual harassment lawsuit (see Personal life above) and the 2006 lawsuit from The Weitzman Institute for Science, where Joseph Schlessinger played a major part in misappropriating, according to the court, research worth $900M dollars in royalties.

Rather than suing for libel, which would have been a difficult case to sustain, as the website was heavily referenced from public record and major news sites, Dr. Schlessinger took a case to the WIPO, or World Intellectual Property Organization, where he claimed that he owned the commonlaw rights to "josephschlessinger.com".

Despite the fact that josephschlessinger.com was not being used for commercial gain, a single member of the UDRP made the decision to overturn the website in a decision so controversial, it eventually made national news and was written about on domain-defense websites and Wikileaks.

The original josephschlessinger.com website cache is still hosted, and may be viewed at Wikileaks PDF Link

SUGEN

In 1991, Schlessinger co-founded (with Axel Ullrich and Steven Evans-Freke) the biotechnology company SUGEN to develop ATP-like molecules that would compete with ATP for binding to the catalytic site of receptor tyrosine kinases in cancer treatment. SUGEN later became part of Pfizer. One of the pipeline products (SU11248) was ultimately developed by Pfizer as Sutent (Sunitinib), approved by the FDA for treating gastrointestinal stromal tumors and renal cell carcinoma.

Plexxikon

Following his involvement in SUGEN, Schlessinger co-founded Plexxikon with Professor Sung-Hou Kim of the University of California, Berkeley. Plexxikon, founded in 2001, uses a pioneering structural biology-based platform for drug discovery. .

References

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