Boris Ephrussi
Boris Ephrussi ( born May 9, 1901 in Moscow, † 2 May 1979 in Paris) was a Russian -born French geneticist.
Life and work
Ephrussi emigrated after the October Revolution from Russia to France. He made in 1922 with a degree in zoology at the Sorbonne and in 1932 received his doctorate in experimental embryology. At that time, he dealt with the influence of external stimuli on the development of fertilized sea urchin eggs and cell cultures. In 1934 he went with a Rockefeller scholarship to Caltech to Thomas Hunt Morgan. There was a collaboration with George Beadle on the genetic control of eye coloring in Drosophila, where they transplanted with micropipettes and micro manipulators parts of organs and tissues of Drosophila larvae. The collaboration was continued during a stay in Paris in 1935 by Beadle and Ephrussi at Caltech in 1936 and was the beginning of a gene-one enzyme hypothesis received the Nobel Prize for the Beadle and Tatum.
During the Second World War was Ephrussi ( the Jew was ) as a refugee at the Johns Hopkins University. He then returned to France, where he conducted research in Gif- sur -Yvette at the "Institut de Biologie Physicochimique " ( IBPC Rothschild Institute ) in Paris and then at the CNRS. He turned to particular genetic research on wheat cells and genetics outside the nucleus ( in the mitochondria ), which was continued by his pupil Piotr Slonimsky and his school. In 1966 he succeeded with Mary Weiss, the production of hybrids of somatic cells of different species. For Ephrussi this was only a further development of techniques for the study of differentiation of cells during embryonic development, the techniques found but soon afterwards widely used in mammalian genetics.
Among his pupils was Jacques Monod.