George A. M. Cross

George Alan Martin Cross ( born September 27, 1942 in Cheshire ) is a born in Britain American molecular biologist and parasitologist. He is particularly concerned with trypanosomes and other protozoan parasite.

Cross graduated from the University of Cambridge, where he took a bachelor's degree in 1964 and in 1968 received his doctorate in microbiology. 1969 to 1977 he conducted research in medical parasitology at the Medical Research Council and from 1977 to 1982 in the research laboratories of the Wellcome Trust, where he led the immunochemistry and molecular biology. He was also from 1980 to 1984 Consultant and Instructor in Biology at the Woods Hole Marine Laboratories. Since 1982 he has Andre and Bella Meyer Professor of Molecular Parasitology at the Rockefeller University, where he was dean from 1995 to 1999. 1983 to 1987 he was a consultant to the WHO.

He specializes in trypanosomes that cause, among others, the often deadly Chagas disease and sleeping sickness in the tropics. Since they have split relatively early from the other eukaryotes, they have developed some unique genetic mechanisms, such as a post-transcriptional modification in contrast to most eukaryotes polycistronic mRNA. How Cross with employees showed, there is a cell surface from a variety of a glycoprotein, but this is highly variable among individual Trypanosomenstämmen. This high variability of the surface glycoproteins (VSG, variant surface glycoprotein ) is used to escape destruction by the host immune system. Cross conducted research with his laboratory at the specific genetic mechanisms that allow this variability ( exchange of the genes involved and change the location of gene expression, which is encoded at telomeric sites).

In 1984 he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize. In 1978 he was awarded the Fleming Prize from the Society of General Microbiology and 1983, the Chalmers Memorial Medal of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. In 1998 he held the Leeuwenhoek Lecture Prize of the Royal Society. He is since 1984 a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He is a U.S. citizen. Cross is married since 1986 and has one daughter.