Overview of Graduates of Vagelos MLS

Vagelos MLS students complete their education at some of the very best Ph.D. programs, M.D. programs or combined degree programs. Roy Vagelos himself earned his B.A. in our department in 1950, after which he earned an M.D. and had a very successful career in science and business.

Historically, of seven science Nobel Prize laureates who earned degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, five earned degrees from the Chemistry Department. Two received B.A. degrees in Chemistry, followed by M.D.s at Penn: M. S. Brown (B.A., 1962; M.D., 1966) and S. B. Prusiner (B.A., 1964, M.D., 1968). Christian Afinsen earned a master’s degree in Chemistry (1939).   Two earned Ph.D’s in Penn Chemistry, E. Negishi (1963) and A. Zewail (1974).

In this context, David Baltimore (Nobel Prize in Medicine,1975; also past President of both the Rockefeller University and the California Institute of Technology), while an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, did his honors thesis research in the laboratories of two Penn Chemistry faculty in 1960.

We expect that Vagelos Scholars will seek novel research paths. The molecular life sciences are broader than today’s views of the biosphere: agriculture, medicine, earth sciences and psychology. Today’s examples of molecular life sciences include: use of molecular machines biological and chemical to sequence DNA to be assembled by mathematical algorithms — a short cut to the genome sequencing, merely a large molecular structure determination. Use of functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the relation of language acquisition and anatomic location in the human brain — a process that uses the physics of the atomic nucleus to monitor changes in chemical environment of molecules in the brain which are localized and mapped by mathematical algorithms. This will become the basis of psychology and linguistics in the future.