By William J. Cromie

Gazette Staff

Stephen Harrison, who was the first to work out the atom-by-atom structure of a virus, has won the 1997 ICN International Prize in Virology. The professor of biochemistry and molecular biology also determined the makeup of the receptor used by the AIDS virus to attach to human cells.

ICN is a pharmaceutical and biotechnology company in California and its award includes a $50,000 cash prize. The award will be presented on Nov. 7 at the Fogg Art Museum.

"Two aspects of this award please me," Harrison, 54, said. "It acknowledges the long-term efforts I've made since I was a Ph.D. student here in the late 1960s and that I continue to make at Harvard, Children's Hospital, and as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Secondly, it recognizes the broad impact that structural biology has had on understanding viruses, not just work carried out in my laboratory but also by colleagues at Harvard and at many other institutions."

In the 1960s, Harrison '63 became interested in using X-rays to map the fine structure of molecules. "A virus was considered the Mt. Everest of x-ray crystallography," he recalled. "It was a terrific challenge that I couldn't resist."

The technique he uses requires purifying a virus, crystallizing it, then scanning it with X-rays. The resulting image can be analyzed to work out the position of each atom.

Harrison received his Ph.D. in 1967 and produced his first three-dimensional image of a virus in 1977. It revealed the intricate structure of a plant virus. He went on to study human tumor viruses and the proteins involved in infection by AIDS viruses.

This research gained him numerous awards, including Harvard's Ledlie Prize and Columbia University's Horwitz Prize.

Last year's winner of the ICN prize was Stanley Prusiner, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on prions, a relatively new class of disease-causing particles.

"Professor Harrison is an eminent biologist and was our unanimous choice for his pioneering work," said Milan Panic, president and chief executive officer of ICN. "His work has dramatically transformed the medical community's understanding of viruses, and his structural studies have led to important advances in solving key problems associated with curing viral diseases."