| 1 | 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. | |||