Subdivision
| • | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | [X] |
| | 1 | 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 | | | | |
| 2 | 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. | |
| 3 | 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 | | | | |
| 4 | 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. | |
| 5 | 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. | |
| 6 | 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 | | | | |
| 7 | 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 | | | | |
| 8 | 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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