“Constantin E. Sekeris”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Constantin Sekeris, called Costas by family and friends, was a Greek biochemist and molecular biologist. He was born in Nafplio, the first capital of Greece where his paternal family came from. During World War II, he accompanied his parents to Egypt, South Africa and finally the USA where his father held different ministerial posts in the Greek Government in exile. The family stayed in the USA till 1944, when, following the liberation of Greece after the defeat of Nazi Germany, they returned permanently to Greece.

Education

After his secondary education at the 8th Gymnasium of Athens, he enrolled at, and graduated from the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1956; after completion of a two-year long compulsory Army service he joined the team of [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Karlson Prof. Peter Karlson] at the Institut für Physiologische Chemie of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He obtained his doctoral degree in Biochemistry in 1962 from the Medical School of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Academic career

In 1964 Sekeris accompanied Karlson when he moved to the position of Director of the Institut für Physiologische Chemie of the Philipps University of Marburg. In 1966 he became a Privatdozent at the Medical School where, in 1970, he was promoted to “Wissenschaftlicher Rat und Professor”, and then to a [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor#Universitätsprofessoren C3 Professor] according to the University law of the State of Hessen (Hesse). In 1974 he moved to the German Cancer Research Centre (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum) in Heidelberg as the Head of the Section “Molecular Biology of the Cell” and a Professor at the Science Faculty of Heidelberg University. In 1977 he finally moved home to Greece as a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Athens, first at the Department of Biology and then (1993) at the Medical School. During his tenure at the University of Athens he held a joint appointment at the Institute of Biological Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, serving as its Director. In 2000 he reached the mandatory retirement age for the Greek Public Service, but he kept performing research, unofficially, up until his unexpected death from a heart attack in 2009.

Sekeris’ main research interest was the mode of action of steroid hormones. He started his research career by working on tyrosine metabolism in insects and then rapidly moved to molecular endocrinology, a field that he essentially never left. Building up from the initial work of Adolf_Butenandt (Karlson’s father in law and director of the Munich Institute), Karlson and Sekeris early on proposed a model on how steroids function ^[1], which was very loosely based on Jacob and Monod’s model for the regulation of the lactose operon of Escherichia coli. He concentrated his later work on steroid receptor(s) including the binding of glucocorticoid receptor to mitochondrial DNA^[2], which he and his group first described. His overall focus could be described as the elucidation of the role of glucocorticoids in the regulation of gene expression and cellular metabolism. This research also led to research on post-transcriptional events such as mRNA processing, and he was the first to describe, early on, the presence of small RNA species involved in the processing of hnRNA. His collective research output was published in more than 250 papers ^[3] and book chapters, making him one of the most prolific scientists in non-clinical life sciences in Greece.

In addition to his long-term directorship of the Institute of Biological Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Sekeris was involved in science administration both in Greece and abroad. He was a member of the Greek Research Council for several years and he also acted as the Chief Executive Officer of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. Among different honours that he received during his career one should mention his election to the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the European Academy of Sciences. After leaving Germany he was made an Honorary Professor of Cell Biology at the Science Faculty of Heidelberg University.

Family

Sekeris was a direct descendant of Panagiotis Sekeris, a merchant and ship owner who lived in Constantinople in the early 19th century and co-founded the Filiki Eteria (a secret society aiming to overthrow the Ottoman rule in Greece), and who spent his entire wealth financing this process. Costas was married twice, to Lioka (Kalliope), born Platsouka (passed away in 1997) and Evi, born Protopappa. He was survived by one son, Evangelos a member of the Hellenic Diplomatic Corps, three grandchildren (Kalliope, Katherine and Constantine) and his three siblings, two brothers (Giorgos and Thanassis) and one sister (Kalliope).

References

1. ^Karlson P, Sekeris CE (1973) Wirkungsmechanismus der Steroidhormone. Dtsch Med Wochenschr. 98(16):831-835.
2. ^Demonacos C, Djordjevic-Markovic R, Tsawdaroglou N, Sekeris CE. (1995) The mitochondrion as a primary site of action of glucocorticoids: the interaction of the glucocorticoid receptor with mitochondrial DNA sequences showing partial similarity to the nuclear glucocorticoid responsive elements. J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol. 55(1):43-55.
3. ^{{cite web|url=https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=35548915900|title=Scopus preview - Scopus - Author details (Sekeris, Constantinos E.)|website=www.scopus.com}}