Subdivision
| • | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Bruce Alberts | | | Institution: | University of California, San Francisco | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Bruce Alberts is a molecular biologist of extraordinary breadth. His rigorous studies of the replication of the genome of a bacterial virus led to the concept of a complex "protein machine" that carries out the sequential steps of DNA replication. Along the way, he discovered novel proteins that unwind, stabilize or relax DNA as they participate in the replication process.
Dr. Alberts is one of the principal authors of The Molecular Biology of the Cell, considered the field's leading advanced textbook and used widely in U.S. colleges and universities. Born in Chicago, he graduated from Harvard College with a degree in biochemical sciences and earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1965. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1966 and after 10 years moved to the Medical School of the University of California, San Francisco, where he is now professor emeritus. He was awarded an American Cancer Society Lifetime Research Professorship in 1980. He served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1993 to 2005. Dr. Alberts has been a leader in efforts to improve science education in public schools and has guided policy studies as chairman of the Commission on Life Sciences of the National Research Council. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Science. In 2010 he was named winner of the George Brown Award for International Scientific Cooperation, in 2014 he was awarded the National Medal of Science, and in 2016 he was recognized by the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Mary C. Beckerle | | | Institution: | Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Mary Beckerle, PhD, is CEO and Director of Huntsman Cancer Institute, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center that is a leader in Cancer Genetics and Precision Prevention. She is a Distinguished Professor of Biology, Associate Vice President for Cancer Affairs, and holds the prestigious Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah. Beckerle earned her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and completed post-doctoral research at the University of North Carolina. An internationally recognized scientist focused on fundamental aspects of Cancer Cell Biology, Beckerle’s research program has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health. Beckerle’s laboratory has made seminal contributions toward understanding cell adhesion and cell migration. In recent years her team has focused on the mechanisms involved in communicating information from the cell surface to the cytoskeleton and the nucleus. In 2000, Beckerle was appointed as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rothschild-Yvette Mayent Award Scholar at the Curie Institute in Paris. She received the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology in 2001, the Sword of Hope Award from the American Cancer Society in 2004, the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the University of Utah’s highest honor, in 2007, the 2018 Alfred G. Knudson Award in Cancer genetics, and the YWCA Utah 2018 Outstanding Achievement Award in Medicine and Health . Beckerle has served on numerous strategic planning and peer review committees for the National Institutes of Health. She is also a respected leader in science policy and practice, having served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology and on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research. She is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Medical Advisory Board and serves on the Board of Directors of both Huntsman Corporation and Johnson & Johnson. In 2016, Beckerle was selected as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel appointed to guide Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, co-chairing the Precision revention and Early Detection Working Group. She is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the National Center for Biological Sciences in India, the Mechanobiology Institute in Singapore, and several National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers. Beckerle has been married to David Murrell since 1990; they have a son, David, who graduated from college in 2017. In addition to spending time with family and friends, Beckerle loves to cook, travel, garden, hike, and bike in the beautiful state of Utah. Mary Beckerle was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Mina J. Bissell | | | Institution: | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Dr. Mina J. Bissell is a world-renowned leader in the area of the role of extracellular matrix (ECM) and microenvironment in regulation of tissue-specific function with special emphasis in breast cancer, where she has changed some established paradigms. She earned an A.B. with honors in chemistry from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in bacterial genetics from Harvard University in 1969. She was a Milton Fellow at Harvard and an American Cancer Society Fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at U.C. Berkeley. She joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1972. Dr. Bissell became a Senior Scientist in 1977, the Director of Cell & Molecular Biology in 1988, and was appointed Director of all of Life Sciences in 1992. Dr. Bissell has authored more than 280 publications and sits on the editorial board of many scientific journals, most recently Science magazine and Journal of Cell Science. She also sits on a number of national and international scientific and government boards. She has received numerous awards and citations and has given more than 80 'named and distinguished' lectures. She was a Fogarty Fellow in 1984, a Guggenheim fellow in 1992 and was elected an AAAS fellow in 1994. She received the 1996 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award and medal, the highest honor of the US Department of Energy. In 1997, she was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and served as President of the American Society for Cell Biology. In 1998, she received the Mellon Award from the University of Pittsburgh and was the 1999 recipient of the Eli Lilly/Clowes Award of the American Association for Cancer Research. In 2001, Dr. Bissell received both an honorary doctorate from the Pierre & Marie Curie University in Paris and the first "Innovator Award" of the US Army breast cancer program. In 2002, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the President of the International Society of Differentiation. Upon stepping down as the Life Science's Division Director, she was named Distinguished Scientist (one of seven, the only woman and the only life scientist to achieve this status) and Senior Advisor to the Laboratory Director on Biology. In 2003, she received the Brinker Award from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. In 2004, she was among the 13 recipients of the first Discovery Health Channel Medical Honor and received another honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen. In 2005, she became the first OBER/DOE Distinguished Scientist Fellow in Life Sciences and received a $1.25 million award for 5 years. In 2006, Dr. Bissell received the H. Lee Moffit Cancer Center Ted Couch Lectureship and Award. In 2007, she received the Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Cancer Research. In 2008 she received the American Cancer Society's Medal of Honor in Basic Research, and the University of Porto and the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology established the Mina J. Bissell Award, a medal to be given out every two years to a person who has "transformed our perception of a topic in science." The American Italian Cancer Foundation awarded her their 2010 Prize for Scientific Excellence in Medicine for "having changed the accepted paradigms in cancer research, for pioneering to create the field of Tumor Microenvironment, and for the courage to persist not only until it is well accepted but also put to clinical use" and in 2011 she was named the recipient of the Jill Rose Award by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. In 2017 she was honored with the 14th AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research and in 2019 she was the recipient of both the APS Jonathan E. Rhoads Medal for Distinguished Service to Medicine and the Weizmann Women & Science Award. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and the American Philosophical Society in 2007. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Helen M. Blau | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Helen Blau is world-renowned for her seminal discovery that the differentiated state is reversible rather than fixed and terminal. Her demonstration of cellular plasticity constituted a paradigm shift in our understanding of mammalian cell differentiation. Using muscle as a model, Blau’s work provided the first definitive evidence that diverse cell types could be reprogrammed using non-dividing cell fusions. Her studies demonstrated that cell differentiation requires continuous regulation and that a shift in the stoichiometry of trans-acting regulators induces nuclear reprogramming, providing the scientific underpinnings for the induction of pluripotent stem cells (iPS). Blau applied this discovery to stem cell biology. She led the field with novel approaches to treating muscle damaged due to disease, injury, or aging. She showed that biophysical and biochemical cues synergize to maintain the stem cell state in culture and rejuvenate the function of aged muscle stem cell populations, profoundly impacting the field of regenerative medicine.
Among Helen Blau's many honors are the 1999 FASEB Excellence in Science Award and a Fulbright Senior Specialists award. She was President of the American Society for Developmental Biology 1994-95, on the National Advisory Council of the National Institute of Aging 1996-2000, President of the International Society of Differentiation 2004-05, and member of the Harvard Board of Overseers 2004-10. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Günter Blobel | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute & Rockefeller University | | | Year Elected: | 1989 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | Death Date: | February 18, 2018 | | | | | | |
German-born cell biologist Günter Blobel was known for communicating difficult concepts in a clear and interesting way. He contributed pioneering work that shed light on diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's and AIDS and provided the basis for bioengineered drugs such as insulin. In 1999 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery that proteins have signals that govern their movement and position in the cell. Each protein, he found, has its own "zip code" that determines whether the protein is transported across or integrated into a specific cellular membrane. Dr. Blobel received his medical degree from the University of Tübingen in Germany in 1960, earned a doctorate in oncology from the University of Wisconsin in 1967 and became a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University protein laboratory, where he had been a professor since 1976. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Society for Cell Biology, he had also been an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1986. Dr. Blobel died on February 18, 2018, at the age of 81 in New York City. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Lawrence Bogorad | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1985 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1921 | | | Death Date: | December 28, 2003 | | | | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Donald D. Brown | | | Institution: | Carnegie Institution | | | Year Elected: | 1981 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | May 31, 2023 | | | | | | |
More than a brilliant investigator, Donald Brown has been one of the central figures in the reshaping of the field of developmental biology. As professor and director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology, he has for decades studied amphibian metamorphosis and, in conjunction, complex developmental programs such as vertebrate organogenesis. In addition to his work at the Carnegie Institution, with which he has been affiliated since 1963, Dr. Brown has served as professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University since 1968. Both his degrees were awarded by the University of Chicago. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Brown is a rare individual whose capacity for communication and synthesis equals his ability in the laboratory. In 2012 he was given the Lasker Special Achievement Award in Medical Science by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Renato Dulbecco | | | Institution: | Salk Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1993 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1914 | | | Death Date: | February 19, 2012 | | | | | | |
A distinguished research professor and president emeritus of the Salk Institute, Italian-born Renato Dulbecco made fundamental contributions to understanding the uncontrolled growth of cells that occurs in cancer. He is best known for his discovery that tumor viruses cause cancer by inserting their own genes into the chromosomes of infected cells. This finding was one of the first clues to the genetic nature of cancer and led to Dr. Dulbecco being awarded a Nobel Prize in 1975. Dr. Dulbecco subsequently began studying the origins and progression of tumors of the breast, using monoclonal antibodies, tools of molecular biology that can identify cells by their chemical signatures, to characterize the tumor cells. In 1986 Dr. Dulbecco launched the idea of studying all human genes, starting the worldwide Human Genome Project. He is the author of The Design of Life (1987), a work that represents, in his words, "the exciting developments that have taken place in biology with accelerated rhythm since the '50s." The last chapter of this book, "A Life Odyssey," is a magisterial summary of the origin and history of living things over the past nearly four billion years. | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. James D. Ebert | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1921 | | | Death Date: | May 22, 2001 | | | | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Ronald M. Evans | | | Institution: | The Salk Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Ronald Evans is March of Dimes Professor in Molecular & Developmental Neurobiology at the Salk Institute and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His discovery of the superfamily of nuclear receptors, including the mineralocorticoid, thyroid, retinoic acid (vitamin A), and retinoid X receptors, was a watershed in the field. His discovery of RXR and its heterodimeric partners proved to be the "Rosetta stone" for identifying hormonal ligands of several hitherto-orphan nuclear receptors, with profound implications for normal physiology, disease pathogenesis and drug discovery. Dr. Evans' discoveries in the field of nuclear hormone receptors defined a unitary signaling pathway and a central paradigm for the control of eukaryotic gene expression. His work established a transcriptional basis to physiology and has led to a new generation of drugs for cancer, metabolic disease and the treatment of muscular dystrophies. He has received numerous awards for his efforts, including the Pasarow Award in Cancer Research (1993); the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award in Metabolic Research (2000); the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology (2003); the General Motors Sloan Prize in Cancer Research (2003); the Keio Medical Science Prize, Japan (2003); the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2004); the Grande Medaille d'Or of the French Academy of Sciences (2005); the Harvey Prize (2006); the Gairdner International Award (2006); and the Lipman Award of the American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (2007). | |
| 11 | Name: | Dr. Elaine Fuchs | | | Institution: | Rockefeller University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | | | | |
Elaine Fuchs is a world leader in mammalian cell biology. She is internationally recognized for her outstanding and numerous contributions to skin biology and its human genetic disorders, including skin cancers and life-threatening genetic syndromes such as blistering skin disorders.
For nearly three decades, Dr. Fuchs has focused on the molecular mechanisms that underlie development and differentiation of the epidermis and its appendages, and elucidating how perturbations of these mechanisms result in disease. She has systematically and brilliantly applied innovative approaches in biology, biochemistry and genetics. In doing so, Dr. Fuchs pioneered the use of "reverse genetics," an approach to start with a specific protein, study its biology and then use mice as a means to ultimately identify the genes responsible for inherited human disorders. A classical geneticist would start with a specific genetic disorder. Instead, Dr. Fuchs has employed this innovative cell biological approach to determine the genetic bases of numerous dermatological disorders in humans. The approach has since broadly benefited human medical genetics.
Dr. Fuchs is widely recognized as having brought the field of dermatological research into modern day science. Her contributions are many, ranging from the identification of proteins and signal transduction pathways important in epidermal and hair functions to uncovering the molecular nature of skin diseases in humans. In addition, Dr. Fuchs and coworkers identified genetic defects in several disorders that arise from perturbations of cytoskeletal proteins related to those present in the skin, but whose expression resides outside the skin, particularly in the muscle and the nervous system. An elegant example of this is her use of reverse genetics to uncover the underlying genetic basis of blistering human skin disorder that arises from defects in epidermal keratin genes. Dr. Fuchs' 10 years of prior research set the groundwork for this discovery, which uncovered a key function of intermediate filament (IF) proteins as mechanical integrators of the cytoskeleton. The work also set the paradigm for more than 20 different human disorders of IF genes.
Dr. Fuchs' ground-breaking research is often used in biology and medical textbooks as a landmark. Her science now focuses on understanding how tissues develop and dynamically respond to their environment. She has seamlessly transitioned from problems of signal transduction to transcriptional regulation and gene expression to the cytoskeleton and adhesion to stem cell lineage commitment. In the nineties, her team uncovered multiple roles for Wnt signaling in skin biology, discovering that sustained Wnt signaling can lead to stem cell activation and tumorigenesis. Their super-furry mice led them to identify stabilizing b-catenin mutations pilomatricomas, a human skin tumor. While b-catenin mutations had been previously linked to colon cancer, pilomatricomas represented the first example where b-catenin mutations are the leading cause of the tumor. Similarly, Dr. Fuchs' work on a-catenin provided insights into squamous cell carcinoma. The lab's transition from degenerative disorders to cancers has been a natural one, occurring concomitantly with their shift to tackling how growth and differentiation are balanced in stem cell lineage progression. Their recent work in isolating and characterizing the multipotent adult skin stem cells opens major new avenues for their future research in this area.
Elaine Fuchs received her undergraduate degree with highest distinction in chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1972). She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Princeton University (1977) and conducted her postdoctoral studies with Howard Green at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she began her research in skin biology. She joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1980, where she progressed to become Amgen Professor of Basic Sciences prior to leaving for Rockefeller University in 2002, where she is Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor. She has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1988. Dr. Fuchs is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She was President of the American Society of Cell Biology in 1991, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Mt. Sinai and New York University School of Medicine. Her scientific awards include the Richard Lounsbery Award (National Academy of Sciences), the Cartwright Award (Columbia University), the Novartis Award in Biomedical Research, the Dickson Prize in Medicine, the National Medal of Science, the 2010 L'Oreal-UNESCO prize, the 2012 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology, the 2015 E. B. Wilson Medal, the 2016 Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science, the 2019 AACR-G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award, and the 2020 Canada Gairdner Award. She has trained more than 20 graduate students and has over 225 publications to her credit. Elaine Fuchs was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005. | |
| 12 | Name: | Dr. Joseph Grafton Gall | | | Institution: | Carnegie Institution of Washington | | | Year Elected: | 1989 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | | | | |
Joseph Gall is an outstanding cytogeneticist known for his research on the organization and structure of genes along animal chromosomes and for developing methods for detecting individual genes on chromosomes. He is a co-discoverer of gene amplification, which was later found to be an important concomitant of some cancers. Dr. Gall received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1952 and has taught at the University of Minnesota and at Yale University, where he was Ross Granville Harrison Professor of Biology and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Chemistry from 1964-83. He has been a staff member in the department of embryology at the Carnegie Institute of Washington since 1983 and American Cancer Society Professor of Developmental Genetics since 1984. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the American Society for Cell Biology's E.B. Wilson Medal in 1983. A scholar of the history and use of microscopes and a collector of scientific books, especially those relating to cytology, Dr. Gall is a true naturalist with an encyclopedic knowledge and curiosity about living things. | |
| 13 | Name: | Dr. Robert Haselkorn | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | | | | |
Robert Haselkorn bio for APS:
I was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1934 in a house built by my mother’s father, a carpenter/contractor who had emigrated from Vilnius in Lithuania around the turn of the 20th century. My father’s father emigrated around the same time, from somewhere in Galicia. I attended PS 197 a short walk from home and moved on to James Madison High School, also walking distance from home. My mother was a math teacher at Madison before I was born. She moved to a different school, Midwood, when I was very young but many of her friends were still there when I started, so I was always comfortable there. A large cohort of friends from PS 197 accompanied me so that even though the school had 6,000 students (!) we enjoyed a substantial degree of security. Many of the teachers were superb, especially in math, English, French and history.
Reviewing the facts of my history it seems to be filled with accidents that, in retrospect, have had very large consequences. The first one I recall is my choice of colleges. One afternoon, when I was a junior in high school, I watched a half-hour television program about Princeton. It described, in ten-minute segments, what it was like to study science, humanities or social studies at Princeton. That sealed it for me. I applied, was accepted, matriculated. The application required a choice of “interest”. I put down chemistry. That steered me to Clark Bricker as advisor during orientation week. His choice of courses made me a chem major. Driven into the arms of Arthur Tobolsky, a polymer chemist, and then Walter Kauzmann, the best teacher in the universe, I was guided firmly to Harvard and the laboratory of Paul Doty for graduate work.
The Doty lab was a wonderful place to learn about the physical properties of proteins and nucleic acids. Best of all, my desk and workbench were placed between those of Helga Boedtker (Doty’s wife) and Ben Hall, an experienced graduate student who went on to become a star at the U of Washington. Ben developed cloning in yeast and holds the patent on production of hepatitis vaccine in yeast. In addition, Doty had persuaded Marianne Grunberg-Manago to spend a few months as a visitor. Marianne had discovered the enzyme polynucleotide phosphorylase, with which it was possible for me to synthesize polyA, polyU, polyC and polyI. My thesis described the physical characterization of those four polymers and their complexes. Those studies provided the basis for exploration of secondary structure in RNA, still being quoted nearly 50 years later, and related work by Noboru Sueoka leading to discovery of the dependence of the melting temperature of DNA on its content of GC base pairs.
Another digression for accidents. When I started my graduate career at Harvard I registered for a room in one of the graduate dorms near the chem labs. I spent exactly one night there. The next day I encountered a friend from Princeton who had completed a year at Harvard Law School. He asked me where I was living. It turned out that he and other law students had secured a large house almost on the Harvard quadrangle that, by a quirk, had just obtained a free bedroom for which a new member of their cartel was needed. Was I interested? In less than an hour I was out of the noisy dorm and into the Lawyers House. This is just the first accident. The second occurred around January. This takes close watching of the chain of events. Another of the House Lawyers was engaged. His fiancée had a friend whose younger sister was a student at Wheelock College, across the river in Boston. Fiancee invited the sister of her friend to dinner. Fiancee asked the sister if she was interested in meeting a graduate student at Harvard, living in the House with her fiancée. Sister agreed. Information was transferred to me, a phone call was made, a date was arranged, and after suitable meetings etc we were married in June of 1957. Two children, four grandchildren and 57 years later Margot and I are still happily together. Some accident.
Jim Watson joined the Harvard faculty about the time I started in the Doty lab. Jim became a very useful member of my thesis committee. When I was finishing the thesis, Doty advised me to write to Francis Crick about a postdoc, which I did. In about two weeks (no email then) Francis replied that they could not take me due to lack of space. I was crushed, Doty was abroad, so I took the letter to Jim. He said not to worry, that the Cavendish was too crowded anyway, why not write to Roy Markham at the plant virus lab in Cambridge. I did that and Roy replied immediately, with a full description of the facilities and the availability of plants and viruses and analytical equipment and colleagues. So I wrote a proposal to the American Cancer Society to determine the RNA sequences of plant viruses (successful), defended the thesis, and sailed for England with Margot and 9-month-old Deborah. We had rented, sight unseen, a house in the suburb of Chesterton belonging to an English biochemist, who was living in Seattle for a while.
The adventures that filled our two years in Cambridge are a separate story. We enjoyed outstanding parties at the Markham house from beginning to end as well as outstanding science at the virus research unit with Roy himself, Maurice Rees, David Dunn, Graham Hills and visitors Bob Symons, David Lipton from Wash U in St. Louis and Mel Simpson still at Yale. I could take advantage of the proximity of downtown Cambridge, with Sydney Brenner, Francis Crick and Fred Sanger before they moved away to the far south end of town. My two accomplishments were simple: demonstration that the RNA prepared from turnip yellow mosaic virus was infectious in Chinese cabbage plants and that said RNA could serve as messenger RNA in a cell-free protein synthesizing system from E. coli.
The latter experiments were carried out with Jim Ofengand in the Cavendish, in the spring of 1961. The timing was not great, because Marshall Nirenberg was doing similar experiments with TMV RNA at the NIH at the same time. He did a control experiment consisting of replacing the viral RNA with polyU, expecting to see nothing made. Instead, he saw polyphenylalanine, which he immediately realized opened the door to deciphering the genetic code. That was not the best time for me to be setting up a new lab, but that is what we had to do. Where?
Time for another accident. The Doty lab produced a large number of scholars trained in the physical chemistry of nucleic acids. Two of them, Stuart Rice and Peter Geiduschek, had already achieved positions of responsibility at the University of Chicago. They knew me socially from meetings at Harvard. Stuart was on leave during the year 1960-61 and he spent that year as a visitor in Chemistry at Cambridge, England. One day I was cycling down the Kings Parade in Cambridge and I literally ran into Stuart. No harm. He asked me what I was doing and then what plans I had for the future. Then he described the program in biophysics in Chicago and arranged for a visit for me, including Peter Geiduschek. If not for the random collision with Stuart, I surely would have started my academic career somewhere else. As it happened, Ray Zirkle provided a fabulous offer in biophysics that placed me next to the labs of Ed Taylor and Peter Geiduschek, with outstanding students and superb equipment. Ed Taylor has been in the same department with me more or less continuously, missing only a few years he worked in London. Stuart Rice and Steve Berry have been in the Chemistry Dept for more than 50 years, as have I. And with my election to the APS, all four of us are members of the three societies: the National Academy, the American Academy and the APS.
My career in Chicago started in the Committee on Biophysics, whose name was changed to Department of Biophysics, then merged with the Department of Theoretical Biology. In 1984 there was a major reorganization creating two new departments, Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. I was appointed in both, as well as in Chemistry. Graduate programs in biophysics rose and fell according to the whims of NIH. Ours thrived for my first 20 years in Chicago, then fell and disappeared in 1984, then was resurrected for another decade, then disappeared and finally came back under a new program in chemistry and biochemistry. Currently it is thriving. As my research program concentrated more on cellular differentiation in nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria, I gravitated to microbiology and genomics.
Much of my success in science has been due to the students, undergraduate, graduate and postdoc, who chose to work in my lab. To be sure, some of these choices were accidental. For example, my first graduate student, David DeRosier, apparently chose my lab as a result of a single lecture I gave in a biochemistry course, in which I described how the optical system worked in the analytical ultracentrifuge. Here is the accident: when I was a graduate student I took the Physiology course at the MBL in Woods Hole. That year, the course included a week of centrifugation taught by Howard Schachman, a spirited and thorough teacher. His example stayed with me and DeRosier was the beneficiary. So was I. DeRosier did his thesis on the structure of Turnip Yellow Mosaic Virus, which I brought with me from Cambridge. That project led to confirmation of an aspect of the model proposed by Don Caspar and Aaron Klug for the structures of spherical viruses. DeRosier proceeded to a postdoc with Klug and the invention of a method for reconstruction of structures from electron micrographs. Of great importance also, DeRosier brought into the lab his friend Bill Shipp, my second student, who produced a slender thesis with two chapters. The first described a double-stranded RNA intermediate in the replication of Tobacco Mosaic Virus in tobacco leaves. The second described DNA in tobacco chloroplasts, which Bill found accidentally as a contaminant in his RNA preparations. Bill’s work was followed closely by another student working on mitochondria in embryonic chicken liver, John Sinclair. Using our ultracentrifuge and Bill’s methods, John showed that the mitochondria contained DNA, readily differentiated from nuclear DNA.
Plant viruses are difficult to study in one respect: the ratio of physical particles to lesions on plants is very high, so it is impossible to correlate physical properties with biological consequences. Frank Stahl urged me to take the phage course at Cold Spring Harbor, which I did, for two purposes. One was to learn how to handle RNA phages, which produced one plaque per physical particle. The other was to learn about the famous DNA phage T4, whose genetics was already extremely advanced. Back in Chicago I had some difficulty with the RNA phages but the T4 work focused on protein synthesis and was reasonably productive. This program was interrupted by a discovery made by Robert Safferman in Ohio: he found the first virus that grew on a cyanobacterial host. We obtained the phage from him and started a collaboration that introduced standard phage techniques into his studies, eventually yielding information about the structure, replication, assembly and contribution of these viruses to photosynthesis in the hosts. Graduate students Ron Luftig, Lou Sherman and Ken Adolph did this work between 1963 and 1970. Ken discovered his own phage in Lake Mendota, a significant discovery because the host organism was Anabaena, an organism that carried out nitrogen fixation, the conversion of N2 to ammonia. Much of our work post-1970 was with Anabaena.
Ken’s thesis described a beautiful virus he discovered and named N-1. When Honoree Fleming joined the lab I thought she would continue work on virus development. But she wanted to study cellular development, specifically the development of heterocysts. This system involved the conversion of an oxygen-evolving cell carrying out green plant photosynthesis into an anaerobic factory carrying out nitrogen fixation. This differentiation involves controlling the expression of 1500 of the 7000 genes in the genome of Anabaena. Eventually this system was studied by students Jean Lang, Jim Orr, George Schneider, Christopher Bauer, Kristen Black , Kay Jones and Doug Rice as well as postdocs Barbara Mazur, Jim Golden, Steve Robinson, Nilgun Tumer, Stephanie Curtis, Sandra Nierzwickie-Bauer, Bianca Brahamsha, Brian Palenik, Martin Mulligan, Dulal Borthakur, Bill Belknap, Sean Callahan, Zi Ye, Amin Nasser and Bill Buikema.
Jim Golden joined my lab as the spouse of Susan Golden, who had chosen to work with me after doing her graduate work with Lou Sherman at the U of Missouri on transformation of Synechococcus. Genetic systems had just been introduced to study photosynthesis, in the early 1980s. Among those systems were studies of the genes encoding components of the photochemical reaction centers, in particular those affected by herbicides. Susan Golden was able to show that one set of herbicides worked by binding to a protein component of the PSII reaction center. With grad student Judy Brusslan in Chicago she continued this work in her position at Texas A&M. At one point their results on transcription of the genes encoding the pabA protein did not agree. Sorting out their differences led to Susan’s discovery of the circadian clock in cyanobacteria.
Jim Golden was also studying transcription in our lab. He worked out a method to extract RNA from heterocysts, the thick-walled cells in which nitrogen was reduced to ammonia. Among the RNA he found some DNA, which he examined with restriction enzymes and discovered that the region containing the genes encoding nitrogenase, the nif genes, was rearranged with respect to the same genes in vegetative cells. Further work showed that one of the nif genes was interrupted by a large DNA element that had to be excised, during heterocyst development, to allow proper transcription of that gene. In his own lab at Texas A&M, Golden went on to discover additional examples of DNA elements interrupting nif genes, that had to be excised during heterocyst development.
This work was done in the early 1980s. Subsequently, Bill Buikema joined the lab and he set out to establish a system of genetic analysis in the cyanobacterium Anabaena. Following leads from Peter Wolk at Michigan State, Buikema succeeded in isolating a large number of mutants unable to differentiate nitrogen-fixing heterocysts. He succeeded in isolating DNA that contained the genes mutated in each mutant, then determined the DNA sequence of both the wild-type and the mutant gene. We still use his mutant collection to study transport mechanisms that send the sugar sucrose from vegetative cells into heterocysts to power nitrogen fixation and at the same time send arginine, a downstream product of nitrogen fixation, from the heterocysts into vegetative cells so the latter can grow and divide.
Genetic studies of cyanobacteria did not get moving until the 1980s. Photosynthesis could be studied also in the purple bacteria, for some of whom there was a defective virus called GTA that could package and transfer DNA from one cell to another. These particles could carry genes, so they became the basis for a genetic system. We started with postdocs Rob Jones and Pablo Scolnik, grad student Peter Avtges, and then Robert Kranz. Kranz made major contributions, is now at Wash U in St. Louis. In the 1990s an exodus began from the USSR, with Michael Fonstein, Tanya Nikolskaya, Olga Zagnitko, Anna Lapidus and Yasha Kohen all contributing to the program to determine the genome sequence of Rhodobacter capsulatus. At the time, companies were being formed to determine bacterial genome sequences for clients who could and did pay $5 million for a complete DNA sequence. (Today that job takes a few days, at somewhat lower cost.)
We purchased, with NSF funds, one of the first wave of ABI DNA sequenators. Part of the cost was covered by the U of Chicago, for which we provided a subsidized DNA sequencing service to others. Every attempt to get support for the Rhodobacter sequencing project from NSF or DOE was turned down. We established a collaboration with a team in Prague, headed by Vaclav Paces, who had been a postdoc with me in 1968. This worked well and we were able to publish together the first 189,000 base pairs of the sequence, which included all the genes required for the synthesis of cobalamin, a complex structure that comprised an important vitamin. But the complete chromosome contained 3,400,000 base pairs, so it was clear we had much to do. Without outside support it took almost 15 years! The final complete sequence was published just a few years ago with authors from the lab in Prague, my lab in Chicago, and a few scattered former employees of Integrated Genomics in Chicago.
For the past 25 years we have been able to run three small programs at the same time. One was the study of the chromosome of Rhodobacter, the second the differentiation of heterocysts in cyanobacteria, focusing on transcription in heterocysts as well as the connections between heterocysts and vegetative cells, and the third a study of the enzyme acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC), which catalyzes the first step in fatty acid biosynthesis.
The ACC program began with the idea that we could use herbicides that target the fatty acid pathway to analyze that pathway, similar to the use of antibiotics that target the ribosome to study protein synthesis. With postdoc Piotr Gornicki, we first examined the cyanobacterium Anabaena, discovering to our regret that Anabaena is resistant to the herbicide called haloxyfop and others that target ACC in plants. Much later we learned that all bacteria are resistant to these herbicides because all bacterial ACC are comprised of four separate subunits, none of which bind these herbicides. Indeed, as many others and we discovered, only grasses (monocots) were killed by the herbicides, while all dicots were resistant. This difference is due to the fact that all plants have a unique ACC in their chloroplasts. In the case of grasses the evolutionary path is via duplication of the gene for a multifunctional large protein. The ACC encoded by this gene is sensitive to haloxyfop. In dicots, the chloroplast ACC is encoded by four genes derived from bacteria and that enzyme is resistant to haloxyfop.
Gornicki and his lab-mates worked all this out doing classical biochemistry, but attempts at doing genetic studies were stymied. Wheat was a suitable grass for biochemistry, but transformation experiments with DNA took about two years in wheat. We decided to transfer the whole system to yeast, which took some time to bring into the lab. Eventually, with help from Gela Tevzadze (an expert) and Marcin Joachimiak (a bright undergraduate) we were able to adapt yeast to analyse the ACC gene from any source: first the wheat chloroplast and cytoplasmic ACC genes, then the ACC genes of parasites such as Toxoplasma, Leishmania and others, and finally the human isoforms ACC1 and ACC2, the latter being one that controls fatty acid degradation in mitochondria, possibly a key to controlling obesity in humans. | |
| 14 | Name: | Dr. Maria Jasin | | | Institution: | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Maria Jasin is a Professor and molecular biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. Other experience includes serving as a professor at the Weill Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
Jasin is a giant in the field of gene editing for genome modification and how spontaneous "gene editing" is causally linked to breast cancers. She received the 2019 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine "for her work showing that localized double-strand breaks in DNA stimulate recombination in mammalian cells. This seminal work was essential for and led directly to the tools enabling editing at specific sites in mammalian genomes." She discovered double-strand DNA break repair proceeded both by non-homologous end-joining repair (mutagenesis) and, astonishingly, homology-directed repair (HDR) (precise gene correction). Thus, she established that an endonuclease-generated double strand break in DNA is an efficient approach for gene editing, setting the paradigm that specified genomic DNA damage enables genome modification. She also found that the breast cancer suppressors BRCA1 and BRCA2 are crucial for HDR, and established HDR as a tumor suppression mechanism, discoveries which have transformed therapeutic approaches.
She is the recipient of the Basser Global Prize for BRCA Research, from the University of Pennsylvania, and the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Jasin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |
| 15 | Name: | Dr. Judith Kimble | | | Institution: | University of Wisconsin, Madison; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
How are cells controlled to grow or differentiate during animal development? Judith Kimble tackled that fundamental question in the developing germline of a small nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. Early in her career she identified the somatic niche that promotes germline growth during development. Since then she discovered that Notch signaling from the niche promotes continued mitosis at the expense of meiotic entry. More recently, she and collaborators have elucidated the molecular network that maintains germline stem cells and controls their balance between mitosis and meiotic entry. Remarkably this network also controls the sperm/oocyte decision, although the mechanism of that dual control is still being addressed. Dr. Kimble has become one of the most respected and creative developmental biologists by exploiting the power of genetics and molecular biology to unravel complex developmental phenomena. Based on her work and that of others, developmental biologists came to realize that embryos as different as worms, fruit flies and mammals share similar developmental mechanisms. Dr. Kimble is the Vilas Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Medical Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she began as a faculty member in 1983; she is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1994. Dr. Kimble is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1995) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995) and holds a Ph. D. from the University of Colorado-Boulder. | |
| 16 | Name: | Dr. Marc Kirschner | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | | |
Marc Kirschner is the John Franklin Enders University Professor at Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Prior to arriving at Harvard, he taught at Princeton University from 1972 to 1978 and the University of California, San Francisco from 1978 to 1993. In 1993, he moved to Harvard Medical School (HMS), where he served as the Chair of the new Department of Cell Biology for a decade. He became the Founding Chair of the HMS Department of Systems Biology in 2003.
Kirschner pioneered at least three fundamental and general concepts that help explain how biology organizes information spatially and temporally. He is a biochemist by training, but has always had a strong interest in using mathematics and physical principles to understand biology at a deeper level. In his game-changing research on the cytoskeleton, Kirschner discovered that microtubules explore space randomly and selectively reinforce productive connections, a concept at the crux of connectivity in the brain, angiogenesis, and many other processes. In his work on the cell cycle, he identified an autonomous oscillation that entrains the order of downstream events. The circadian clock and the vertebrate somite segmentation clock use similar principles. In frog embryo development, he found that a locally produced factor, FGF, provides instructions that induce a region of tissue to adopt a new fate; this discovery informed much of our understanding of developmental patterning. These seminal discoveries, and the technologies he developed to enable them, have been profoundly influential throughout biology and establish him as one of the great experimental biologists of all time. Kirschner has also been an advocate for federal biomedical research funding and served as first chair of the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy, a coalition of scientific societies he helped create in 1993 to educate the U.S. Congress on biomedical research and lobby for public funding of it.
Kirschner helped launch the monthly, peer-reviewed journal PLoS Biology in October 2003 as a member of the editorial board and senior author of a paper in the inaugural issue. He received the Richard Lounsbery Award in 1991, the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2001, the American Society for Cell Biology's E.B. Wilson Medal in 2003, Carnegie Mellon University's Dickson Prize for Science in 2004, and Technion's Harvey Prize in 2015, the American Society for Cell Biology's Public Service Award in 1996, the William C. Rose Award, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2001, the Rabbi Shai Shacknai Memorial Prize in Immunology and Cancer Research in 2003, and Carnegie Mellon University's Dickson Prize for Science in 2004. He was President of the American Society for Cell Biology from 1990 to 199. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1989, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1989, the Royal Society of London since 1999, and the Academia Europaea since 1999. Kirschner was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2021. | |
| 17 | Name: | Dr. Stanley J. Korsmeyer | | | Institution: | Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | Death Date: | March 31, 2005 | | | | |
| 18 | Name: | Dr. Richard Losick | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Richard Losick received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. He was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow in 1969, and in 1972 he joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he is currently the Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology, a Harvard College Professor, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He is a past chairman of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology. He teaches the introductory course on molecular biology at Harvard College, and as Head Tutor he is responsible for the undergraduate concentration in Biochemical Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and a former Visiting Scholar of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. His research interests include RNA polymerase, gene transcription and its control, and development in microorganisms. Recently, Dr. Losick was honored with the 2007 Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology for "discovering alternative bacterial sigma factors and his fundamnetal contributions to understanding the mechanicsm of bacterial sporulation" and the 2012 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for discovering the structure of bacteria. | |
| 19 | Name: | Dr. Elliot M. Meyerowitz | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1998 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
A member of the Caltech faculty since 1980, Elliot Meyerowitz is the George Beadle Professor of Biology and chair of the Division of Biology. He studies the genetics of flowering plants, especially Arabidopsis thaliana. His laboratory has identified and cloned homeotic flower development genes, leading to the "ABC Model" of floral organ specification, and was the first to clone plant hormone receptors. Their current work combines studies of gene expression and cell division patterns with computation to understand plant growth. Among his honors are the Pelton Award of the Botanical Society of America and the Conservation Research Foundation; the American Society of Plant Physiologists' Gibbs Medal; the Genetics Society of America Medal; and the International Prize for Biology from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Professor Meyerowitz is past president of the Genetics Society of America, the International Society for Plant Molecular Biology, and the Society of Development Biology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (recipient, Lounsbery Award) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a foreign associate of the Academie des Sciences of France, and a foreign member of the Royal Society. | |
| 20 | Name: | Dr. Jane M. Oppenheimer | | | Institution: | Bryn Mawr College | | | Year Elected: | 1980 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1911 | | | Death Date: | 3/19/1996 | | | | |
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