Jay Keasling
Jay D. Keasling (* 1964) is Professor of Chemistry and Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his bachelor's degree at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln and received his PhD in 1991 from the University of Michigan, where he also completed his master's program. He is also Director of the Physical Biosciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and founder of the Department of synthetic biology at UC Berkeley. He is regarded as one of the leading scientist in the field of synthetic biology, particularly of metabolic engineering. Other research areas include systems biology and environmental biotechnology (environmental biotechnology ).
Keasling is working, among other things, to change the bacterium Escherichia coli so that it produces the antimalarial drug artemisinin. This is naturally extracted from the plant Artemisia annua, and, although very effective available for the treatment of malaria, very expensive and not in sufficient quantities. The fact that he is using bacteria instead of plantings for the recovery of the drug, Keasling tries to reduce to $ 0.25, the cost per dose of 2.40 dollars.
2004 awarded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation total $ 42.5 million to the laboratory of Jay Keasling, Amyris Biotechnologies and the Institute for OneWorld Health to develop the cheap drug artemisinin to produce and distribute.
2006 Keasling was chosen by the American magazine Discover for the first time to the " Scientist of the Year ".