Subdivision
| • | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | [X] |
| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Keith R. Porter | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 1977 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1912 | | | Death Date: | 5/2/97 | | | | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. Elizabeth S. Russell | | | Institution: | Jackson Lab | | | Year Elected: | 1983 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | May 28, 2001 | | | | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. David D. Sabatini | | | Institution: | New York University School of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | | | | |
David D. Sabatini was born in Argentina, where he earned his medical degree from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in 1954. Obtaining a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1960, Dr. Sabatini undertook postdoctoral training first at the Yale University School of Medicine and later at Rockefeller University. While at Yale, he introduced the glutaraldehyde fixation procedure for the preservation of subcellular structures, which revolutionized the field of biological electron microscopy by permitting cytochemical studies at the electron microscope level. In 1966, he received his Ph.D. from Rockefeller, where he remained as a faculty member in the Laboratory of Cell Biology. In 1972, Dr. Sabatini became Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at the New York University School of Medicine, where he continued to investigate protein trafficking mechanisms, extending his work from the functions of the endoplasmic reticulum to the role of the Golgi apparatus in organelle and plasma membrane biogenesis. At New York University, he and his associates developed a system of cultured polarized kidney-derived epithelial cells (MDCK) which now serves as a common paradigm for studying the physiological properties of transporting epithelia. Using this system, they also discovered the polarized budding of enveloped viruses from epithelial cells. These studies provided the preeminent model currently used to investigate membrane protein sorting and plasma membrane biogenesis in epithelial cells. His current scientific interests continue to lie in the areas of protein traffic and membrane organelle biogenesis. David Sabatini has written more than 120 scientific publications and is the recipient of several scientific and teaching awards, including the Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology (2000) and New York University's Alpha Omega Alpha Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award (2000). In 2014 he won the NAS Award in Molecular Biology. He became Frederick L. Ehrman Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology at New York University School of Medicine in 2016. Dr. Sabatini was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2000. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Randy Wayne Schekman | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Dr. Randy Schekman is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He studied the enzymology of DNA replication as a graduate student with Arthur Kornberg at Stanford University. His current interest in cellular membranes developed during a postdoctoral period with S. J. Singer at the University of California, San Diego. At Berkeley, he developed a genetic and biochemical approach to the study of eukaryotic membrane traffic. Among his awards are the Eli Lilly Award in microbiology and immunology, the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award in basic biomedical science, the Gairdner International Award, the Amgen Award of the Protein Society, the Albert Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University and the Dickson Prize in Medicine from the University of Pittsburgh. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2013. He has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Geneva and the University of Regensburg. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1999, he was elected President of the American Society for Cell Biology and was appointed Editor of the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2002, he was elected Chair of the Biochemistry Section of the National Academy of Sciences and was selected as Scientific Director of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Biomedical Research. In 2005, he was elected Chair of the Biology Class of the NAS and in 2006 he was appointed Editor-in Chief of the Proceedings of the NAS. At UC Berkeley, Schekman has assumed a number of leadership positions in Departmental and campus affairs. In addition to serving a five-year term as Biochemistry Division Head, Schekman served as Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. Currently, he serves as Chair of the Chancellor's Advisory Council on Biology, a virtual College of Biology that represents all 250 life science faculty distributed within the College of Letters and Science, School of Public Health, School of Optometry, School of Engineering, College of Chemistry, and College of Natural Resources. In 2004, he organized a campus-wide stem cell biology center to capitalize on California's investment in the application of human embryonic stem cells to regenerative medicine. Randy Wayne Schekman was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. Lucy Shapiro | | | Institution: | Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2003 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Lucy Shapiro received her Ph.D. in molecular biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1966. She joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1967 and served as chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology (1977-86), Kramer Professor of Molecular Biology (1977-86) and director of the Division of Biological Sciences (1981-86). In 1986 she moved to Columbia University as the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and chairman of the Department of Microbiology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Crossing to the other coast in 1989 to the Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Shapiro became the founder and chairman of its Department of Developmental Biology, and the Joseph D. Grant Professor of Developmental Biology. She is currently Stanford's Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research, and, as of 2001, director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. Lucy Shapiro cultivated a single organism into one of the most powerful experimental systems for understanding the control of the bacterial cell cycle and the establishment of cell fate. Her research has yielded fundamental insights into the bacterial cell as an integrated system in which the transcriptional circuitry is interwoven with the three-dimensional deployment of regulatory and morphological proteins. Her genome-wide transcriptional analysis revealed basic rules for bacterial cell cycle control. In pioneering work, Dr. Shapiro initiated the "cell biology" of prokaryotes, resulting in the first demonstration that proteins are dynamically localized in the cell, adding a spatial dimension to regulatory networks. Dr. Shapiro is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She was awarded the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the Natural Academy of Sciences, the 2010 Abbott-ASM Lifetime Acheivement Award, the 2012 Horwitz Prize, and the 2012 National Medal of Science. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2003. | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Phillip A. Sharp | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1991 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Phillip A. Sharp received his D.Phil. from the University of Illinois in 1969 and, after postgraduate training first at the California Institute of Technology and later Cold Spring Harbor, he joined the Center for Cancer Research (now the Koch Institute) and Department of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. He served as the Center's director (1985-91) and head of the Biology Department (1991-99) and was founding director of the McGovern Institute from 2000-04. Dr. Sharp is currently Institute Professor, the highest academic rank. Throughout his career as a scientist and educator, Dr. Sharp has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the National Medal of Science, the Inaugural Double Helix Medal from Cold Spring Harbor, and the Hope Funds for Cancer Research Award for Excellence in Basic Science (2013). In 1993, he received the Nobel Prize for the discovery that genes contain nonsense segments that are edited out by cells in the course of utilizing genetic information. His work shattered existing scientific dogma and gave scientists a better understanding of how some hereditary diseases and cancers develop, thereby opening further the possibilities of gene therapy. Dr. Sharp is currently member of the Board of Trustees of MGH and of the Scientific Board of the Ludwig Institute. He is co-founder and a member of the Board of Directors of Biogen Idec, Inc., and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Sharp has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1991. In 1999 he was awarded the Society's Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences. The citation read "in recognition of his work on the biology of tumor viruses which led to his discovery that genes contain nonsense segments that are edited out by cells in the course of utilizing genetic information. This landmark achievement, known as RNA splicing, altered the course of molecular biology." He is also the 2010 recipient of the American Association for Cancer Research's Margaret Foti Award for Leadership and Extraordinary Achievements in Cancer Research. In 2015 he received the Othmer Gold Medal. | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. Allan Spradling | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Carnegie Institution for Science | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan Allan Spradling studied mathematics and physics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Switching to biology at MIT, where he earned his PhD. in 1975, Spradling used Drosophila polytene chromosomes as genome arrays to study transcription, and found that heat shock causes a universal genetic response.
Spradling began a long fascination with the ovary during a postdoctoral stint at Indiana University, where he discovered that Drosophila eggshell genes undergo amplification during follicle development. In 1980 he joined the faculty at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore, and two years later he and colleague Gerry Rubin showed how transposable elements can be used to introduce DNA into the . Unlike contemporary transformation methods in other animals, Drosophila genes introduced in transposons functioned normally, allowing cognate genetic defects to be cured and developmental gene regulation to be studied. Remaining at Carnegie, Spradling was appointed an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1988, and Director in 1994. Spradling’s group developed methods for using single transposon insertions to isolate and manipulate Drosophila genes. These efforts initiated the Drosophila Gene Disruption Project, whose freely distributed strains have facilitated Drosophila research worldwide.
The basic biological and genetic mechanisms that make multicellular animals possible are turning out to be largely the same in all species. Studying model organisms lays the groundwork for deciphering how mammalian cells and tissues develop and operate. For example, Spradling’s group analyzed the basic biology of tissue stem cells, and in 2000 characterized the first stem cell niche. Recently, his lab showed that mammalian oocytes are constructed like Drosophila oocytes, using materials transported from sister germ cells, which thereby act as "nurse cells." Indeed, egg production from beginning to end is turning out to be much more highly conserved than originally anticipated.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) since 1989, and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences since 1991, Spradling has been awarded many prizes for his work. These include the NAS Molecular Biology Award (jointly with Gerry Rubin). He also received the E.J. Conklin Award of the Society for Developmental Biology and the G.W. Beadle Award of the Genetics Society of America. Spradling also received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was the 2008 winner of the Gruber Prize in Genetics. | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Clifford J. Tabin | | | Institution: | Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Clifford J. Tabin is the George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor and Chair of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. Tabin began his work in developmental biology during a brief postdoc in the laboratory of Doug Melton at Harvard University, before leaving a year later for a position as an independent Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1989.
Tabin pioneered the molecular genetic analysis of embryonic development of vertebrates, and ever since has been a leader in the field that attempts to understand how limbs and digits develop in individuals and evolve in different species. He has made outstanding contributions to the question of how bilateral symmetry in appendages like wings and legs is regulated, and how, in contrast, asymmetry arises in development, as in the placement of the heart in humans and in the coiling of the intestine. In other pioneering work his group have identified genes that regulate the length and depth of the beaks of Darwin’s finches, and genes that are responsible for the loss of pigment and vision in cave fish. He established a preclinical science education program in the medical school in Kathmandu in Nepal in order to train doctors to work with poor people in rural areas.
He received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 1999, the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology in 2008, and the Society for Developmental Biology’s Conklin Medal in 2012. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2000, the National Academy of Sciences since 2007, and the Royal Society of London since 2014. Tabin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 29 | Name: | Dr. Kenneth V. Thimann | | | Institution: | University of California, Santa Cruz & Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1959 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 1/15/97 | | | | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Shirley M. Tilghman | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Shirley M. Tilghman was elected Princeton University's 19th president on May 5, 2001, and assumed office on June 15, 2001. She became President Emerita in 2013. An exceptional teacher and a world-renowned scholar and leader in the field of molecular biology, she served on the Princeton faculty for 15 years before being named president. She continues now as Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Affairs. A native of Canada, Dr. Tilghman received her Honors B.Sc. in chemistry from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1968. After two years of secondary school teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she obtained her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia. During postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health, she made a number of groundbreaking discoveries while participating in cloning the first mammalian gene, and she continued to make scientific breakthroughs as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and as an adjunct associate professor of human genetics and biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Tilghman came to Princeton in 1986 as the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences. Two years later, she also joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as an investigator. In 1998, she took on additional responsibilities as the founding director of Princeton's multi-disciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. A member of the National Research Council's committee that set the blueprint for the U.S. effort in the Human Genome Project, Dr. Tilghman also was one of the founding members of the National Advisory Council of the Human Genome Project Initiative for the National Institutes of Health. She is renowned not only for her pioneering research but for her national leadership on behalf of women in science and for promoting efforts to make the early careers of young scientists as meaningful and productive as possible. Dr. Tilghman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the Royal Society of London. Her awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Developmental Biology, the Genetics Society of America Medal, the L'Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science, and the Yale Legend in Leadership Award. In 2014 she was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. She serves as a trustee of the Jackson Laboratory and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; as a director of Google, Inc.; and, beginning in October 2008, as chair of the Association of American Universities. In 2008 she was named to the board of trustees of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2000. | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. Harold Varmus | | | Institution: | National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City from 2000 until 2010. On December 20, 2008, Harold Varmus was appointed co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology by incoming President Obama. He was appointed Director of the National Cancer Institute in July 2010 and served through March 2015. He is currently Senior Advisor to the Dean and Provost at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
Much of Dr. Varmus' scientific work was conducted during 23 years as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco, where he and Dr. J. Michael Bishop and their co-workers demonstrated the cellular origins of the oncogene of a chicken retrovirus. This discovery led to the isolation of many cellular genes that normally control growth and development and are frequently mutated in human cancer. For this work, Bishop and Varmus received many awards, including the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Varmus is also widely recognized for his studies of the replication cycles of retroviruses and hepatitis B viruses, the functions of genes implicated in cancer, and the development of mouse models for human cancer (the focus of much of the current work in his laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center).
In 1993, Dr. Varmus was named by President Clinton to serve as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, a position he held until the end of 1999. During his tenure at the NIH, he initiated many changes in the conduct of intramural and extramural research programs, recruited new leaders for most of the important positions at the NIH, planned three major buildings on the NIH campus, and helped to increase the NIH budget from under $11 billion to nearly $18 billion.
In addition to authoring over 300 scientific papers and five books, including an introduction to the genetic basis of cancer for a general audience, Varmus has been an advisor to the federal government, pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, and many academic institutions. He served on the World Health Organization's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, chairs the Board of Directors of Public Library of Science and the Scientific Board of the Grand Challenges in Global Health, and is involved in initiatives to promote science in other countries. He has been a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences since 1984 and of the Institute of Medicine since 1991. His latest book, for which he won the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, is a memoir entitled The Art and Politics of Science (2009). In 2011, he was awarded the Double Helix Medal from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
A native of Freeport, Long Island, Varmus is the son of Dr. Frank Varmus, a general practitioner, and Beatrice Varmus, a psychiatric social worker. After graduating from Freeport High School, he majored in English literature at Amherst College and earned a master's degree in English at Harvard University. He is a graduate of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, worked as a medical student in a hospital in India, and served on the medical house staff at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. His scientific training occurred first as a Public Health Service officer at the NIH, where he studied bacterial gene expression with Dr. Ira Pastan, and then as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Bishop at the University of California, San Francisco.
He is married to Constance Casey, a journalist and horticulturist; their two sons, Jacob and Christopher, also live in New York City. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Alexander Varshavsky | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Alexander Varshavsky is the co-founder, together with Avram Hershko (Technion, Haifa, Israel), of the field of ubiquitin and regulated protein degradation. In the 1980s, Dr. Varshavsky and coworkers discovered the first physiological functions of ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis (in the cell cycle, DNA repair, ribosome biogenesis and stress responses), the first degradation signals in short-lived proteins, and several crucial mechanistic attributes of the ubiquitin system. Thanks to this singularly important work, studies of the ubiquitin system have become a major arena of modern biology. Other contributions by Dr. Varshavsky include his discovery of the first exposed (nucleosome-free) regions in chromosomes, elucidation of the catenane-based mechanism for segregation of daughter DNA during chromosome replication, and several widely used biochemical and genetic methods. A graduate of the Institute of Molecular Biology, Moscow (1973), Dr. Varshavsky served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1977-92 before moving to the California Institute of Technology, where he is Howard and Gwen Laurie Smits Professor of Cell Biology. In 2008 he received a EUREKA grant from the National Institutes of Health and the inaugural Gotham Prize for Cancer Research, an annual million dollar award established to encourage new and innovative approaches to cancer research. He was awarded the King Faisal International Prize for Science in 2012 and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, founded by Yuri Milnor, in 2013. | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. George Wald | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1958 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1906 | | | Death Date: | 4/12/97 | | | | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Irving Weissman | | | Institution: | Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
Irving Weissman is Professor of Pathology, Professor of Developmental Biology, and Director of the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. A major contributor to cellular immunology, virology and oncology, he clarified the thymus's role in producing T-lymphocytes; implicated viral receptors in leukomogenesis; discovered lymphocyte homing receptors for lymph node venules; and characterized cellular recognition in protochordates. Weissman was the first to isolate mammalian stem cells, identifying these blood forming cells in mice and humans and defining the stages of development between stem cells and mature blood cells and cells of the immune system. This has led to important new treatments for leukemia and lymphoma since the stem cells he isolated are the ones that allow successful human bone marrow transplantation. Another important contribution by Weissman and his colleagues was the development of the SCID-hu mouse, which has functional human immune cells. This model allows human disease to be studied in vivo in experimental rodents. Weismann's transplantation of human tissue and cells to an immunodeficient mouse model has allowed him to isolate human hematopoietic stem cells. Most recently, he has isolated human stem cells capable of generating brain neurons. Irving Weissman received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1965 and has served on the university's faculty since 1969. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1989) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1990) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009). He has been awarded the Linus Pauling Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Science; the Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal of the National Academy of Sciences; the E. Donnall Thomas Prize of the American Society of Hematology; and the Robert Koch Award. Irving Weissman was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 35 | Name: | Dr. Carroll M. Williams | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1969 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1916 | | | Death Date: | 10/11/91 | | | | |
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