BRIEF: Nobel laureate gives speech to 200

Eigen, who recieved a Nobel prize for chemistry in 1967, was the featured speaker for the Wistar Institute's Tadeusz Wiktor Memorial Lecture. Wiktor, who worked at Wistar, helped develop the rabies vaccine. In a lecture called "Virus Quasi-Species: Pandora's Box," Eigen also gave a mathematical interpretation of viruses, but still tried to explain some basic facets of the virus to the audience. "A virus is essentially a message," Eigen said. "The message says reproduce me." Eigen concluded that viruses are constantly changing and emphasized that a vaccine which will always be successful cannot efficiently be developed for any virus. The Nobel Laureate also predicted that the AIDS virus will eventually become less severe as it changes. However, his conclusions were drawn from his theory and not from experimental evidence. Many in the audience praised Eigen afterwards calling is original approach as brilliant. "The way he approaches evolution [of viruses] is unconventional," explained molecular biologist Srini Vasan. Some added though that he did not teach them anything new in the lecture. Eigen is currently the director of the Department of Biochemical Kinetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany. -- Heidi Gleit

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