Gerald Fink
Ralph Gerald Fink ( born 1940 in Brooklyn, New York City ) is an American geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Life and work
Fink earned at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, a BS in Biology in 1965 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, a Ph.D. in molecular biology and genetics. His dissertation topic was Gene - enzyme relationships in histidine biosynthesis in yeast. As a postdoctoral fellow he worked with Bruce Ames at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1967, Fink joined the faculty of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, recently. Professor of Genetics and Professor of Biochemistry 1982 moved to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, whose director he was between 1990 and 2001, and was also a professor of molecular genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His local professorship is sponsored by the American Cancer Society.
Fink is an international leader in the genetics of yeasts, particularly Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Fink is one of the founders of molecular cloning in yeasts ( transformation ), so that the basis of an industrial- genetic production of numerous drugs such as insulin or vaccines was created. Fink was able to enlighten several factors that determine the pathogenicity of yeasts. He contributed to the spread of Arabidopsis thaliana ( thale cress ) as a model organism in plant biology and genetics at. Genetic engineering interventions could develop plants Fink who to salt or drought are particularly tolerant (salt tolerance, drought tolerance ). At the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Iceland Fink gave many years courses for Genetics of Yeasts and led many researchers approached this area of research.
2002/2003 Fink was chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Research Standards and Practices to Prevent the Destructive Application of Biotechnology Use, a research - committee that drafted guidelines to minimize the risk of misuse of biotechnology for terrorist purposes ( bioterrorism ) without hindering the biotechnological research as a whole.