Richard Hynes

Richard Olding Hynes ( born November 29, 1944 in Nairobi, Kenya) is a British- American molecular biologist, who is particularly concerned with cell adhesion.

Hynes is the son of a freshwater ecologist and a physics teacher. He studied biochemistry at Cambridge University with a bachelor 's degree in 1966 and a master's degree in 1970. He received his doctorate in 1971 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in biology. 1971-1974 he was a Research Fellow at Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London.

From 1975 he was assistant professor and in 1983 professor of biology at MIT, since 2002 Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research. 1991-2001 he was the Director of The Center for Cancer Research and Development. 1989 to 1991 he headed the Biology Department at MIT. He's at MIT in the Department of Biology and the David H. Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research. Since 1988 he is also a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an associate member since 2004 Broad Institute of MIT.

As researchers at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London in the early 1970s, he examined what the surface of cancer cells differs and found the cell adhesion molecule fibronectin, which was present in normal cells but not in cancer cells from normal cells. Later discovered another group of proteins that play an important role in cell adhesion, the integrins: they couple to the outside, for example to the fibronectins, which form the external matrix and inside both components of the cytoskeleton as well as at the signaling system the cell. He examined the role of Zelladhäsionssystems and defects therein in cancer ( and the formation of metastasis and angiogenesis in cancer ) in white blood cells, in which a defect in the important fight infection cell coupling mechanisms leading to inflammation and blood clotting, where defects in of cell-cell coupling can lead to thrombosis. Selectins play an important role in blood clotting and inflammation ( white blood cells) and are the subject of research in the laboratory of Hynes. He examined the result of genetic defects in Zelladhäsionssystem of mouse strains in his laboratory. A frequently observed sequence were defects in angiogenesis. His laboratory also investigated what. Estimated the 2000 to 3000 human genes (5-10 % of the genome in mammals ), which play a role in cell adhesion, play an active role in carcinogenesis and identified some of these They also study the evolutionary development of this gene system ( Adhesome ).

In 1997 he received the Gairdner Foundation International Award. In 1982 he was Guggenheim Fellow. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was president of the American Society of Cell Biology.

He is a British and American citizen.