The Norman H. Giles Distinguished Lectureship in Genetics was established in 1989 to honor the contributions of Norman Giles in the creation of the Department of Genetics. Giles oversaw the recruitment and development of an interdisciplinary program in genetics, which became a department in 1980. Norman Henry Giles was born in Atlanta on August 6, 1915. He earned his A.B. in Biology from Emory and moved to Harvard, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1940 under the direction of Karl Sax. Sax was an early pioneer in recognizing the effects of radiation on mutation. Sax, and his students, including Giles, focused their attention on the plant genus, Tradescantia, which had a small number of large chromosomes; ideal for studying the effects of chromosomal rearrangements. Giles published early qualitative and quantitative work on both spontaneous and induced chromosomal aberrations in Tradescantia. His first academic appointment, in 1941, was as an Instructor, then Assistant Professor of Botany, at Yale. He rose through the ranks, becoming a Professor of Biology at Yale in 1951. In the 1950's, Giles began work on the fungal species, Neurospora crassa, which would be the focus of his research for the next 35 years. Giles and his students would make fundamantal contributions to the genetic analysis of biochemical pathways. From 1961 until his departure from Yale in 1972, he was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Genetics. Giles was recruited to Athens as the Fuller H. Callaway Professor of Genetics, the chair he held until his retirement in 1986. He was an active presence in the Department until his death, in New Hampshire, on October 16, 2006, from complications following a fall. A Biographical Memoir authored by Mary Case and Frederick de Serres was published by the National Academy of Sciences. Norman Giles was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Fulbright Fellowship for work at the Australian National University in Canberra and at the University Genetics Institute in Copenhagen. He served as President of the Genetics Society of America (1970) and the American Society of Naturalists (1977). He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1966, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Giles earned an honorary doctorate from Emory in 1980 and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1982. In 1985, Giles received the Lamar Dodd Award, the highest research honor given at the University of Georgia. The Genetics Society of America awarded him the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal in 1988, one of the highest awards in the field of genetics. Norman H. Giles Distinguished Lecturers 2008 Gerald Fink Massachusetts Institute of Technology   2006 Elizabeth Blackburn University of California, San Francisco               2004 Walter J. Gehring University of Basel   2000 Sean B. Carroll University of Wisconsin               1999 Susan L. Lindquist University of Chicago   1998 Elliot Meyerowitz California Institute of Technology               1995 Ira Herskowitz University of California, San Francisco   1993 Arthur Kornberg Stanford University               1992 David Botstein Stanford University   1991 John Abelson California Institute of Technology               1990 Francis H. Ruddle Yale University   1989 Charles Yanofsky Stanford University