Gerald M. Rubin

Gerald Mayer Rubin ( born 1950 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist.

Rubin is since 2000 one of the Vice- President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and since 2003 director of the Janelia Farm Research Campus, at the planning and establishment of which he was instrumental.

Life

Rubin attended the Boston Latin School and graduated in 1971 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) has a bachelor's degree in biology. He studied with Salvador Luria and took summer courses at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the Medical Research Council ( MRC) in Cambridge, he earned a PhD in 1974 with the work of Studies on a 5.8 S Ribosomal RNA of a yeast RNA of 158 base pairs in length. At the same time as Rubin worked Sydney Brenner, James Watson, Francis Crick, Fred Sanger and Max Perutz at the MRC. As a postdoctoral fellow Rubin worked with David Hogness at Stanford University, where he put the first gene library of Drosophila.

After a brief stint in 1977 as an Assistant Professor of Biology at the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Rubin went as a researcher at the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore. 1983 brought Daniel Koshland Rubin Professor of Genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the Chair of Genetics since 1987. Also since 1987, Rubin researching in addition to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute ( HHMI ) and has also a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. As Rubin in 2000 vice-president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was, he laid down his professorship at Berkeley. Passes at the Janela Farm Rubin (2012 ) continue their own research group.

Work

With his method, stable inject cloned genes into the genome of the germ cells of Drosophila, opened Rubin - together with Allan C. Spradling - genetics and developmental biology of new possibilities. Other key works Rubins dealt with transposons, the molecular basis of Hybriddysgenese (see P - element # Hybriddysgenese ) and the genetic modification of Drosophila P- elements. In 1992 he founded with Spradling the Drosophila genome project - was completed in 2000 - in collaboration with J. Craig Venter. Recent work dealing with the function of Drosophila genes have homologs in humans, and with the structure and function of the brain of Drosophila

Awards (selection)

Another prize: Howard Taylor Ricketts Award