PRE 1920s
1866
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), Father of Genetics
Gregor Mendel, through his work on pea plants, discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance. He deduced that genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent. Mendel tracked the segregation of parental genes and their appearance in the offspring as dominant or recessive traits. He recognized the mathematical patterns of inheritance from one generation to the next. Mendel's Laws of Heredity are usually stated as:
1) The Law of Segregation: a gene pair defines each inherited trait. Parental genes are randomly separated to the sex cells so that sex cells contain only one gene of the pair. Offspring therefore inherit one genetic allele from each parent when sex cells unite in fertilization.
2) The Law of Independent Assortment: Genes for different traits are sorted separately from one another so that the inheritance of one trait is not dependent on the inheritance of another.
3) The Law of Dominance: An organism with alternate forms of a gene will express the form that is dominant.
The genetic experiments Mendel did with pea plants took him eight years (1856-1863) and he published his results in 1865. During this time, Mendel grew over 10,000 pea plants, keeping track of progeny number and type. Mendel's work and his Laws of Inheritance were not appreciated in his time. It wasn't until 1900, after the rediscovery of his Laws, that his experimental results were understood.
1869
FRIEDRICH MIESCHER (1844-1895)
Friedrich (Fritz) Miescher isolated the first crude preparation of DNA,
he just didn't know it. He named it nuclein. Fritz came from a
well-respected family that was part of the intellectual elite in Basel,
Switzerland.
Miescher was an excellent student despite his shyness and a
hearing handicap. Miescher initially wanted to be a priest, but his
father opposed the idea and Miescher entered medical school.
He decided to base his career on medical research. He
experimented and isolated a new molecule - nuclein - from the cell
nucleus. Miescher continued to work on nuclein for the rest of his
career.
Miescher himself believed that proteins were the molecules
of heredity. However, Miescher laid the groundwork for the molecular
discoveries that followed. Miescher died in 1895 from tuberculosis.
1900
CARL ERICH CORRENS (1864-1933)
Carl Correns was born in Münich, Germany, and was orphaned at an early
age. He was raised by his aunt in Switzerland. In 1885, he entered the
University of Münich to study botany. Correns was a tutor at the
University of Tübingen when he began to experiment with trait
inheritance in plants in 1892.
Correns was active in genetic research in Germany, and was
modest enough to never have a problem with scientific credit or
recognition. In 1913, Correns became the first director of the newly
founded Kaiser Wihelm Institut für Biologie in Berlin-Dahlem.
Unfortunately, much of his work was unpublished and destroyed when
Berlin was bombed in 1945.
HUGO DE VRIES (1848-1935)
Hugo de Vries was born in Haarlem, Netherlands. He was a Professor of
Botany at the University of Amsterdam when he began his genetic
experiments with plants in 1880. He completed most of his hybridization
experiments without knowing about Mendel's work. Based on his own
results, de Vries drew the same conclusions as Mendel. De Vries
published his work in 1900, first in French then in German.
It is now known that de Vries had the right idea, but for
the wrong reasons. Most of the variants that de Vries isolated from
Oenothera lamarckiana were due to aberrant chromosomal segregations, and
not to mutations associated with specific genes.
ERICH VON TSCHERMAK-SEYSENEGG (1871-1962)
Erich
von Tschermak-Seysenegg was born in Vienna, Austria. His father was a
well-known mineralogist, and his maternal grandfather was the famous
botanist, Eduard Fenzl, who taught Gregor Mendel at one point. He
studied agriculture at the University of Vienna, and worked on a farm to
gain practical agricultural experience. Tschermak graduated with a
doctorate from the Halle-Wittenberg University.
Tschermak was a plant breeder, and his hybridization
experiments were done with the idea of improving crops using the laws of
heredity. He did most of the work himself, and produced high-yielding
food crops such as wheat, barley, and oats. In 1903, Tschermak was
appointed associate professor at the University of Agricultural Sciences
in Vienna, and later became a full professor. He has a major influence
in agriculture and plant breeding in Austria.
1911
THOMAS HUNT MORGAN (1866-1945)
Thomas Hunt Morgan established the chromosomal theory of inheritance.
Morgan had become interested in species variation, and in
1911, he established the "Fly Room" at Columbia to determine how a
species changed over time. For the next 17 years, in a 16 X 23 ft. room,
Morgan and his students did ground-breaking genetic research using
Drosophila melanogaster, fruit flies.
In 1933, Thomas Hunt Morgan received the Nobel Prize for
Medicine for his work in establishing the chromosomal theory of
inheritance. He shared the prize money with his children, and those of
his long-time colleagues, Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges. Although
Morgan officially retired from his position at Cal Tech in 1941, he
continued to work in the lab until his death in 1945.
1920 - 1949
1920
HERMANN MULLER (1890-1967)
Hermann
Muller showed that X-rays could induce mutations. Born in Manhattan in
1890. His father influenced Hermann with his socialist ideals and a love
of science.
In the 1920s, Muller performed his Nobel prize-winning
research showing that X-rays could induce mutations and he became
instantly famous.
Muller's outspoken views on socialism also got him in
trouble with the Texas administration. He helped publish a Communist
newspaper at the school, and the FBI tracked his activities. Feeling
that U.S. society was regressing during the Depression, Muller left for
Europe in 1932.
Muller spent eight weeks in Spain helping the International
Brigade develop a way to get blood for transfusions from recently killed
soldiers, and then worked at the University of Edinburgh where he
continued to work on X-rays and other mutagens like UV and mustard gas.
In 1946, Muller won the Nobel Prize for his work on
mutation-inducing X-rays and he used the opportunity to continue
pressing for more public knowledge about the hazards of X-ray radiation.
Muller died in 1967 of congestive heart failure.
1931
BARBARA MCCLINTOCK (1902-1992)
Barbara
McClintock did pioneer work in plant genetics and determined the
mechanism for transposition in corn. She was born in Hartford,
Connecticut. Her father was an army doctor and her mother was a piano
teacher. She had a passion for information, and in a time when a woman's
career was a successful marriage, McClintock was determined to go to
college.
By the time she finished her undergraduate credits, she
found herself in graduate school in the new field of cytology. As a paid
assistant in her second year of graduate work, she improved on a method
that her employer was using and was able to identify maize chromosomes.
It was a problem he had been working on for years and she effectively
scooped her own boss. McClintock was awarded an unshared Nobel Prize for
Physiology or Medicine in 1983. McClintock was a research investigator
at Cold Spring Harbor until her death in 1992.
GEORGE WELLS BEADLE (1903-1989)
George Beadle, "Beets" to his friends, and Edward Tatum experimentally
demonstrated the "one gene one protein" hypothesis. Born in Wahoo,
Nebraska, his father was a farmer. Beadle's mother died when he was
four, and his father and housekeepers raised Beadle, his brother, and
his sister.
Beadle's father thought he might become a farmer. However,
Beadle's high school science teacher encouraged him to go to college.
Beadle and Tatum shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
In 1945, Beadle accepted the Chair of the Division of
Biology at Caltech, replacing T. H. Morgan who had died. After
retirement in 1969, Beadle took up research again. In 1981, Beadle
developed Alzheimer disease. He died in 1989.
1941
EDWARD LAWRIE TATUM (1909-1975)
Edward Tatum was born in Boulder, Colorado. While Tatum was growing up,
his family moved a number of times. His father had different teaching
positions at various universities and colleges in the Midwest. Tatum
grew up in a science-oriented household as his father had a Ph.D and an
M.D.
Edward Tatum shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine. And in 1958 Tatum and his student Joshua Lederberg shared the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Tatum died in 1975 from heart failure complicated by emphysema from a lifetime of cigarette smoking.
JOSHUA LEDERBERG (1925 - 2008)
Joshua Lederberg was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and as he said in a 1998 interview, he must have been born a scientist.
In addition to his own bacterial research, Lederberg had two
other interests. One was artificial intelligence; Lederberg helped
develop one of the first computer systems (DENDRAL) that could make
decisions using a specific set of algorithms and a database. Lederberg's
other interest was exobiology.
Lederberg's latest project is to compile an informational
web site at the National Library of Medicine using archival material he
has accumulated over the years.
1944
OSWALD THEODORE AVERY (1877-1955)
Oswald Avery and Maclyn McCarty showed that Fred Giffith's "transforming
principle" was DNA. Avery was born in 1877 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His
father was a Baptist minister.
During his study at Colgate University he became the leader
of the college band and acquired the nickname "Babe" because of his
small stature.
Avery found medical research more intellectually satisfying.
Avery worked on many strains of bacteria, applying different
immunological and chemical methods. In 1913, Avery published a clinical
study of the tuberculosis bacterium.
In 1954, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. Avery died the following year after a painful illness.
EVELYN WITKIN (1921 - )
A native New Yorker, Evelyn Witkin was a pioneer in the
field of biological responses to DNA damage, Witkin made history in the
mid-1940s with her first experiments. She identified a strain of E. coli
bacteria known as B/r that was more resistant to radiation than the
parental B strain. This was the first time mutations conferring
resistance to radiation had been isolated. Witkin's research focused on
how bacteria could repair DNA damage caused by ultraviolet (UV)
radiation.
Evelyn Witkin has received numerous honors and awards in
recognition of her achievements, including election to the National
Academy of Sciences in 1977. Her current passion involves finding
connections between two of her favorite Victorians, Robert Browning and
Charles Darwin.
Early 1950s
1950
ERWIN CHARGAFF
He
isolated DNA from different organisms and measured the levels of each
of the four nitrogenous bases. The nucleotides must be arranged so that
there are about equal amounts of A (adenine) and T (thymine), and about equal amounts of G (guanine)
and C (cytosine) (Chargaff's ratios).
1952
ROSALIND ELSIE FRANKLIN (1920-1958)
Rosalind Franklin produced the X-ray crystallography pictures of BDNA
which Watson and Crick used to determine the structure of
double-stranded DNA. She was born in London, England. Her family was
well-to-do. Rosalind Franklin was extremely intelligent and she knew by
the age of 15 that she wanted to be a scientist. Her father actively
discouraged her interest since it was very difficult for women to have
such a career.
She published a number of papers and she did a lot of the
work while suffering from cancer. She died from cancer in 1958.
In 1962, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was
awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins (her
colleges) for solving the structure of DNA.
ALFRED DAY HERSHEY (1908-1997)
Alfred
Hershey and Martha Chase did the Hershey-Chase blender experiment that
proved phage DNA, and not protein, was the genetic material. Alfred
Hershey was born in Owosso, Michigan. In 1946, working with Delbrück,
Hershey discovered that phage can recombine when co-infected into a
bacteria host. This led to a new area of phage genetics.
As leading researchers in the field of bacteriophage,
Delbrück, Luria, and Hershey established the American Phage Group which
had a tremendous influence on bacteriophage research.
Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria.
1953
LINUS PAULING
Linus Pauling proposed a triple-stranded helix sructure for DNA.
Late 1950s
1955
FRANCIS HARRY COMPTON CRICK (1916-)
Besides
coming up with the double helix structure for DNA with James Watson,
Crick also proposed the Central Dogma and Adaptor Hypothesis. Francis
Crick was born in a small town near Northampton, England.
As a child, Crick was very inquisitive and he read all of
the books of Children's Encyclopedia that his parents bought him.
Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the
1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for solving the structure of
DNA.
Crick and some of his fellow scientists, including James
Watson, were members of the informal "RNA tie club," whose purpose was
"to solve the riddle of RNA structure, and to understand the way it
builds proteins."
In 1961, Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner provided genetic
proof that a triplet code was used in reading genetic material.
JAMES DEWEY WATSON (1928-)
James Watson and Francis Crick came up with the structure for DNA. Watson was born in Chicago.
In 1962, Watson shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or
Medicine with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins who, with Rosalind
Franklin, provided the data on which the structure of DNA was based.
Watson has played a significant role in the development of
science policy, from the War on Cancer, through the debates over the use
of recombinant DNA, to promoting the Human Genome Project.
One of his major interests is education. His first textbook,
"Molecular Biology of the Gene," set new standards for biology
textbooks, and it was followed by "Molecular Biology of the Cell," and
"Recombinant DNA".
He is actively exploring the avenue of multimedia education.
He was and is one of the main motivators of the project: DNA from the
Beginning.
1954
SEYMOUR BENZER (1921-2007)
Seymour Benzer was born in 1921 and grew up in the Bensonhurst
neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. His parents emigrated from Warsaw, Poland
and worked in the garment industry. Although his family was not
interested in science, Benzer dissected flies in his basement lab and
read books on atomic physics during synagogue.
Benzer spent most of his time travelling to other labs to work in molecular biology.
In 1971, Benzer received the Lasker Award for this "brilliant contribution to molecular genetics."
As a professor of biology at Caltech, he and his graduate
student Ronald Konopka were the first to find a gene that controls an
organism's sense of time. Benzer received the Crafoord Prize in 1993 for
his pioneering work in genes and behavior.
1956
PAUL CHARLES ZAMECNIK (1913- )
Paul Zamecnik and Mahlon Hoagland determined the identity of Crick's adaptor molecule, tRNA.
Although Zamecnik trained to be a medical doctor, he was
always interested in science. He eventually decided to go into research
because there was so much to discover.
His interest in protein synthesis started with a question.
In 1938, as an intern, Zamecnik was doing an autopsy on an obese woman.
He wondered why there was fat when there should have been protein and
muscle - no one knew the answer.
In 1952, Zamecnik was partially successful in that he made a
cell-free extract from rat liver with which he was able to synthesize
proteins from amino acids. In 1953, using this system, Zamecnik and
Mahlon Hoagland showed that amino acids had to be energized,
"activated," by ATP before they were incorporated into a peptide chain.
In 1960, his lab developed a cell-free extract from the
bacteria E. coli. He shared the preparation method with other
scientists. Marshall Nirenberg and Johann Matthaei used the cell-free
extract from E. coli to crack the genetic code.
In 1978, he made another interesting observation. He found
that oligonucleotides were able to enter cells. This led to a new area
of research and possible therapy.
Zamecnik still runs a lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and is a Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.
MAHLON HOAGLAND (1921- )
Mahlon Hoagland was born in Boston. His father was a research scientist with an interest in neurobiology.
In 1953, Hoagland started work in Zamecnik's lab on the problem of amino acid activation.
He then began working on a project that Zamecnik had put on
hold. This led to the discovery of tRNA, the adaptor (predicted by
Francis Crick) that shuttles amino acids to messenger RNA. The results
were published in 1957 and served to connect two fields of science
research, biochemistry and molecular biology.
Although Hoagland is now retired, he still has a strong
interest in education and teaching. Over the years, he has written a
number of "non-scholarly" books on the subject of genes and molecular
biology.
1957
MATTHEW STANLEY MESELSON (1930-)
Meselson
and Stahl experimentally proved Watson and Crick's model of
semi-conservative replication. Matthew Meselson was born in Denver,
Colorado. He had always wanted to be a chemist.
Meselson's and Stahl's "classic" paper was published in 1958
and their experiment has been called "one of the most beautiful
experiments in biology."
He discovered the enzymatic basis of host DNA protection,
where the cell recognizes its own DNA by adding methyl groups to it.
Meselson also discovered the process of DNA mismatch repair, which allows cells to fix mistakes in DNA.
Since 1963, Meselson has been concerned about the use of chemical and biological weapons in warfare.
FRANKLIN WILLIAM STAHL (1929-)
Franklin "Frank" Stahl was born in Boston.
In 1957, Stahl and Meselson developed the technique of
density gradient centrifugation and used it to prove that DNA was
replicated in a semi-conservative way, as predicted by Watson and Crick
in their 1953 paper.
In 1959, Stahl accepted a position at the University of
Oregon where he is now a distinguished professor of Molecular Biology.
His current research interest is on the mechanisms of genetic
recombination.
ARTHUR KORNBERG (1918- )
Arthur
Kornberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents emigrated from
Eastern Europe and neither of them had a formal education. Kornberg's
parents believed that education was very important and encouraged their
children to stay in school. Kornberg was an excellent student.
He was mostly involved in research on nutrition and
metabolic reactions. He isolated DNA polymerase I and show that life
(DNA) can be made in a test tube.
In 1959, Kornberg shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology and
Medicine with Severo Ochoa-Kornberg for the enzymatic synthesis of DNA,
Ochoa for the enzymatic synthesis of RNA.
Over the years, Kornberg isolated and identified over a hundred enzymes used in metabolic reactions.
Kornberg enjoys teaching and has written a textbook on DNA
replication as well as an autobiography on his experiences as a
scientist. He sees science as a 'creative activity' and an 'art form'.
1960s
1961
SYDNEY BRENNER (1927- )
Sydney Brenner was born in Germiston, South Africa.
In 1957, Brenner, Seymour Benzer, Francis Crick, and Leslie
Barnett published a paper in Nature on the fine mapping of mutations in
phage. Brenner then moved onto the problem of how the information was
transferred between DNA and protein. In 1960, Brenner, François Jacob,
and Matthew Meselson designed and worked on another series of
experiments establishing the existence and function of messenger RNA.
In 1998, with a donation from tobacco giant Phillip Morris,
Brenner established and is the director of the Molecular Science
Institution (MSI) in Berkeley, California.
MARSHALL WARREN NIRENBERG (1927-)
Nirenberg
shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Har Gobind
Khorana and Robert Holley for cracking the genetic code. Originally born
in New York City.
In 1961, Nirenberg and J. H. Matthaei published their
landmark paper. They showed that a synthetic messenger RNA made of only
uracils can direct protein synthesis. The polyU mRNA resulted in a
poly-phenylalanine protein - they had the first piece of the genetic
code.
In subsequent years, Nirenberg and his group deciphered the
entire genetic code by matching amino acids to synthetic triplet
nucleotides.
Nirenberg and his group also showed that with few exceptions, the genetic code was universal to all life on earth.
FRANÇOIS JACOB (1920-)
François Jacob grew up in Paris. Jacob attended medical school until the
impending German invasion forced him to flee to England in 1940.
Jacob and Monod's unraveling of the lac operon not only
introduced the new concept of regulatory sites on DNA, but also the
concept of mRNA. Jacob worked with Sydney Brenner to verify the
hypothesis.
JACQUES LUCIEN MONOD (1910-1976)
Jacques Monod and François Jacob were the first to discover how genes
were turned on and off. Jacques Lucien Monod was born in Paris but he
grew up in sunny Cannes, home to the Cannes Film Festival. By age 16, he
decided to become a biologist.
Arthur Pardee, François Jacob, and Monod's studied how
bacteria make an inhibitor to keep beta-galactosidase production turned
off.
By the time the lac operon system was worked out, Monod
switched his curiosity to allostery. Monod called the concept the second
secret of life.
In the latter part of his career, Monod interpreted the
findings of molecular biology for the general public in his book,
"Chance and Necessity," and directed the Institut Pasteur. Monod died in
1976 of leukemia; his last words were "Je cherche a comprendre" (I am
trying to understand.)
1965
ROY JOHN BRITTEN (1919-)
Roy Britten showed that eukaryotic genomes have many repetitive, noncoding DNA sequences. He was born in Washington D.C.
Britten has been interested in evolutionary biology,
specifically the nature of repetitive DNA and its origin and
evolutionary history. He is also looking at other repetitive elements in
the human genome.
Britten has a number of hobbies and interests outside of science.
1970s
1970
DAVID BALTIMORE (1938-)
David Baltimore was born in New York City.
Baltimore, Temin and Renato Dulbecco shared the 1975 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the
interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell.
Currently, Baltimore is the president of California Institute of Technology and has been since 1998.
HOWARD MARTIN TEMIN (1934-1994)
Howard Temin was born in Philadelphia.
He developed his provirus theory, which hypothesized that
RSV and other RNA viruses entered the cell and then made DNA copies of
themselves before integrating into the host genome.
He published his results in 1964 and in 1975 shared the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with David Baltimore and Renato
Dulbecco for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor
viruses and the genetic material of the cell.
Although Temin did not smoke, he died in 1994 from lung cancer.
1972
STANLEY NORMAN COHEN (1935-)
Stan Cohen was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. As a child, he was very interested in science, especially in how things worked.
While he was at the National Institutes of Health, he made
the decision to combine basic research with clinical medicine. In 1968
he began experimenting with plasmids. Plasmids have clinical importance
because of the drug resistance genes they carry.
Cohen worked on ways of breaking up the plasmids, and isolating usable fragments for cloning.
Cohen is a Professor of Genetics at Stanford University. He
is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1980, won the
Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. He was awarded the National
Medal of Science in 1988.
Herbert W. Boyer (1936-)
Herb Boyer was born in Derry, Pennsylvania.
At a conference in Hawaii in the early '70s, Boyer met
Stanley Cohen who was working on plasmids. The two began a collaboration
that eventually led to the creation of the first recombinant DNA.
He and Cohen have won numerous awards for their discovery:
1996 Lemelson-MIT Prize for Invention and Innovation, 1993 Swiss Helmut
Horten Research Award, and 1980 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research
Award, among others.
Maxine Singer
Maxine
Frank Singer, President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, NIH
intramural scientist, and distinguished member of the National Academy
of Sciences, is also a tireless and eloquent advocate for biomedical
research.
Singer's scientific focus has progressed from experiments on
the synthesis and structure of RNA and the genetic code, to work on
animal viruses, to defective SV40 viruses in monkey cells.
Her current research springs from her discovery of a transposable element in human DNA.
Singer has won many awards and honorary degrees, not only
for her scientific work but for her science advocacy and community
service as well.
1974
Richard John Roberts (1943-)
Richard (Rich) Roberts was born in Derby, England.
In 1972 James Watson offered Roberts a position at Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory. Roberts accepted the position and started
investigating the enzyme Endonuclease R which he heard about from Dan
Nathans. The enzyme cut DNA into specific pieces. During the '70s and
early '80s, about 75 out of 100 known enzymes were isolated in Roberts'
lab.
Some of these restriction enzymes were used to map
adenovirus DNA, a project in which Phil Sharp, in Joe Sambrook's lab,
was also involved. Through the course of their experiments, they
discovered biochemical proof that the genes in adenovirus were split. In
1993, Roberts shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with
Phil Sharp for the discovery of the split gene.
Roberts also helped develop one of the first computer
programs that maps and analyzes DNA restriction enzyme fragments. He was
an early advocate of computer use in molecular biology.
Phillip Allen Sharp (1944-)
Phillip (Phil) Sharp was born in Kentucky.
Sharp worked with and studied bacterial plasmids. Sharp was
interested in gene expression and worked with simple viruses, like SV40
and adenovirus. Sharp mapped the adenovirus genome. He and his
colleagues then mapped the adenoviral mRNAs and linked them to function.
Sharp shared the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
In 1978, Sharp and a group of other scientists, including
Walter Gilbert, founded Biogen Inc., one of the first biotech companies.
It is now centered in Boston.
In addition to the Nobel, Sharp has won numerous prizes for his work.
1975
Roger Kornberg (1947-)
Roger
Kornberg figured out the importance of histones to chromatin structure.
With both parents being well-respected scientists, it was not
surprising that Roger Kornberg developed an interest and an enthusiasm
for science.
Kornberg studied chemistry and biochemistry, and without having to think about it, became a scientist.
In 1978, he moved to Stanford University where he is now professor of structural biology.
Over the past 35 years, Kornberg has published over 150
research papers on phospholipid and chromatin structure, gene regulation
and transcription control.
Frederick Sanger (1918-)
Frederick Sanger was born in Rendcombe, England.
He was the first person to obtain a protein sequence. Sanger
won his first Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958 for his work on the
structure of protein.
Solving the problem of DNA sequencing became a natural
extension of his work in protein sequencing. Sanger initially
investigated ways to sequence RNA because it was smaller. Eventually,
this led to techniques that were applicable to DNA and finally to the
dideoxy method most commonly used in sequencing reactions today. Sanger
won a second Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1980 sharing it with Walter
Gilbert, for their contributions concerning the determination of base
sequences in nucleic acids, and Paul Berg for his work on recombinant
DNA.
1980s
Leland Hartwell (1939-)
Lee Hartwell was born in Los Angeles.
After his Ph.D., Hartwell went to the Salk Institute because
he wanted to work with Renato Dulbecco. Hartwell already knew he wanted
to work on cell division, which was one of Dulbecco's research
interests.
He also made the rather risky decision to start using yeast
as a model system. Not many people were using yeast at the time, but
Hartwell wanted and needed a simpler experimental system to study basic
questions of cell growth. Hartwell is a pioneer in yeast genetics, and
has used yeast to identify many of the genes involved in protein
synthesis as well as the cell cycle.
His lab works on the molecular mechanisms that maintain and
support gene variations, which can eventually lead to the evolution of
new species.
In 2001, Leland Hartwell shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine
and Physiology with Timothy Hunt and Paul Nurse for their discoveries of
key regulators of the cell cycle.
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (1942-)
Christiane (Janni) Nüsslein-Volhard was born in Frankfurt, Germany during World War II.
When she finished her Ph.D. in 1974, she wanted a new
challenge and began to investigate the idea of using genetics to study
developmental problems. She read a review about some Drosophila mutants
and became interested in the bicaudal mutation.
She learned to screen for mutants and developed techniques to analyze the mutations.
In 1978, Nüsslein-Volhard accepted a job at the new European
Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. Eric Wieschaus was hired at
the same time. The two began working together to analyze embryonic
Drosophila mutants and developed a screen to isolate new mutations.
Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus shared the 1995 Nobel Prize with Ed Lewis
for their work in Drosophila development.
Eric Francis Wieschaus (1947-)
Eric Wieschaus was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1947.
In 1978, Wieschaus was offered a job at the newly
established European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg.
Nüsslein-Volhard had been offered a job there as well, and the two of
them were able to collaborate on the experiments they had talked about
in Basel. They carried out large-scale mutagenesis experiments to find
developmental Drosophila mutants. The result of their work was a new
understanding of the mechanism involved in early Drosophila development.
Wieschaus and Nüsslein-Volhard shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for their
work with Ed Lewis.
In 1981, Wieschaus accepted a position at Princeton
University and he has been there ever since. His research continues to
focus on development, specifically on changes in cell shape during the
various developmental stages.
Kary Mullis (1944- )
Kary Mullis was born in Lenoir, North Carolina.
In 1979, Mullis joined the Cetus Corporation outside of San
Francisco, California, as a DNA chemist. He spent seven years there,
during which he carried out research on the synthesis of
oligonucleotides. While at Cetus, Mullis invented the polymerase chain
reaction (PCR), a technique that amplifies specific DNA sequences from
very small amounts of genetic material.
PCR has revolutionized DNA technology by allowing scientists
to produce an almost unlimited amount of highly purified DNA molecules
suitable for analysis or manipulation. The monumental significance of
PCR was recognized in 1993, with Mullis receiving a Nobel Prize in
chemistry.
Alec Jeffreys
Sir
Alec Jeffreys's involvement with mammalian molecular genetics began in
1975, when, as a postdoc, he moved from Oxford University to the
University of Amsterdam to work with Dick Flavell. There, the two and
their colleagues tried to clone a mammalian single-copy gene.
In 1983, Jeffreys found that the repeat sequences, dubbed
"minisatellites," contain certain "core" sequences. This opened the way
for the development of probes, containing the core sequences, for
detecting many other such regions of variable DNA.
1989
Thomas Robert Cech (1947-)
Thomas (Tom) Cech was born in Chicago and grew up in Iowa City.
In 1978, Cech accepted a position in the Department of
Biochemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It was here that he
and his research group did the work leading to the discovery that RNA
can self-splice and thus can act as a ribozyme. For this discovery, Cech
shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Sidney Altman.
Among his many honors and awards, Cech received the 1995 National Medal of Science.
Sidney Altman
He was born in Montreal in 1939.
Nobel Winner 1989 shared with T. R. Cech for Chemistry for
discovery that RNA can self-splice and thus can act as a ribozyme.
Mario Renato Capecchi (1937-)
In
college at Antioch, Capecchi began studying for a political science
degree to combine his esteem for science with his sense of social
responsibility. But he found little science in politics and abandoned it
for physics and chemistry.
In 1996, he received the Kyoto Prize honoring his lifetime achievement in the betterment of humanity.
1990 - 2000
Howard Robert Horvitz (1947- )
Bob Horvitz was born in Chicago, Illinois.
Horvitz was interested in neurobiology, but because of his
limited experience with biology in general, he started working with
phage (a virus that infects bacteria), to learn the basics.
He has won a number of awards for his work including the
1999 Gairdner Foundation Award. Horvitz is a co-founder and Chairman of
Idun Pharmaceuticals Inc., a biotech company based in La Jolla,
California that is developing therapeutics focusing on apoptosis.
He shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
with colleagues John Sulston and Sydney Brenner. All three made major
contributions in the field of developmental biology using the model
organism Caenorhabditis elegans.
Mary-Claire King (1946- )
Born in a suburb of Chicago.
With her background in genetics and a personal interest in
cancer, King then turned her attention to analyzing the pattern of
breast cancer in families. Her findings suggested that the disease might
be inherited in some cases, and she set herself the ambitious goal of
finding the genes responsible for inherited breast cancer. In 1990, King
and her colleagues proved the existence of the first gene to be
associated with hereditary breast cancer, now known as BRCA1.
She received the Clowes Award for Basic Research from the
American Association for Cancer Research, the Brinker Award from the
Komen Foundation, and was a Glamour magazine "Woman of the Year".
1995
Stephen P. A. Fodor (1953-)
Steve Fodor was born in Seattle, Washington.
He was put in charge of developing a process to generate
miniature high-density arrays of biological compounds. This led to the
development of the first DNA GeneChip®, and the techniques to read and
analyze these chips for large-scale genomic studies. He and his
colleagues received the AAAS' 1992 Newcomb Cleveland Award for this
work.
He has won numerous awards for his work on and the
development of GeneChip® including the 2002 Takeda Foundation Award, the
2002 Economist Innovation Award for Nanotechnology, and the 2002 Oxford
Bioscience Award.
2000
Patrick Henry Brown (1954-)
Pat Brown was born in Washington, D.C.
He began to think of this idea as a DNA array - laying down DNA samples into columns and rows.
From the very beginning of this project, Brown had a very
clear vision of what was needed. His first collaboration with an
engineer failed because the mechanization of producing a DNA array
became too "engineered."
Later with computerized automation, these DNA arrays can
hold up to 80,000 samples - more than the estimated total number of
genes that make up a human being.
In 1995, Brown published the first of many papers that use
DNA arrays to analyze patterns of expression. He had held workshops on
how to build DNA arrays and has made the protocols available at his web
site.
John Craig Venter (1946-)
Craig
Venter began the race to sequence the human genome when he unexpectedly
announced to a room full of genome researchers that they could just
quit now, thank you, because his company would finish the job.
John Craig Venter was born in 1946 in Salt Lake City.
In the early 1990s, Venter developed the EST method of finding genes.
As he turned his focus to the human genome, Venter left TIGR
and started the for-profit company Celera, a division of PE Biosystems,
the company that makes the latest and greatest sequencing machines.
Using these machines, and the world's largest civilian supercomputer,
Venter finished assembling the human genome in just three years.
Francis Collins (1950-)
If
sequencing the human genome is the Holy Grail of biology, then Francis
Collins is its King Arthur. Collins has overseen the mapping, the
sequencing, and the funding of biology's first "big science" project as
the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993.
At Yale, Collins began working on ways to search the genome for genes that cause human disease.
In 1989 Collins had his first big success with the method
when he pinpointed the gene that causes cystic fibrosis. He continues to
search for disease genes at NIH.
John Sulston (1942 -)
Born in Cambridge, England.
Sulston had his first big breakthrough in 1976, when he
described the cell lineage for a part of the developing nervous system
of C. elegans, mapping the neuronal circuitry and the migratory pathways
of the entire nervous system. He also showed that every member of the
species undergoes exactly the same program of cell division and
differentiation.
Staring into the microscope in two four-hour shifts per day
for 18 months, Sulston was able to track every cell that was born and
died in the 14 hours. Through this work, Sulston built a cell-fate map
of C. elegans, enabling other scientists to compare and use mutants to
find genetic defects. He completed this work in the early 1980s, and
soon moved on to trying to sequence the entire genome of C. elegans.
Sulston was offered huge amounts of money to sequence and
patent genes, but he refused on both moral and scientific grounds. He
believes it is morally wrong to patent genes as they are not invented,
and scientifically wrong as it blocks the advancement of knowledge.
Sulston instead chose to work on a publicly funded sequencing project as
director of the Sanger Center, making his data freely available as soon
as he had it. Nobel Winner 2002.
