Stephen Fodor

Stephen Philip Alan Fodor ( born 1953 in Seattle, Washington) is an American geneticist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the biotechnology company Affymetrix and one of the pioneers of DNA chip technology.

Life and work

Fodor graduated from Washington State University, a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's in biochemistry. In 1985 he earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University in chemistry. His dissertation was titled Resonance Raman Spectroscopy Ultraviolet of the Nucleic Acids. As a postdoctoral fellow he worked with a grant from the National Institutes of Health at the University of California, Berkeley, from where he was in 1989 promoted to the Affymax Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. Here it was his duty, together with Lubert Stryer and other arrays to miniaturize ( molecular investigation systems ), which led to the development of microarrays and finally the DNA chip technology. To improve the method founded Affymax 1993, the subsidiary Affymetrix, whose founder and director of Fodor was.

The methods of Fodor and employees made ​​large-scale genomic analyzes, such as the Human Genome Project possible. Among the numerous applications of the methods also include analysis of antibiotic-resistance genes of microorganisms ( antibiotic resistance ) or the cancer genes of a tumor ( tumor suppressors, oncogenes).

Awards (selection)

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