On Thursday, March 24 Dr. Baldomero "Toto" Olivera will be our visiting seminar speaker to the Biology Department. Dr. Olivera is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Utah. He is best known for his pioneering work isolating and characterizing peptides from cone snail venom, the conotoxins, which he began studying several decades ago in a bare-bones lab in his native Philippines. His work has provided scientists with research tools to dissect the function of ion channels in the mammalian nervous system and has led to the development of new analgesic drugs, but more importantly Olivera's work illustrates the power of doing basic science to understand the exquisite specificity of the pharmacological agents that have evolved in the natural world. The title of Dr. Olivera's talk is  "Learning Drug Design from Venomous Fish-hunting Cone Snails: Evolutionary Success through Neuropharmacology".    Dr. Olivera's talk will be at 4:00 p.m. in room 116 of the Morgan Biology building. Please join us for what is sure to be a very interesting seminar.