Jacob (Bruno) Bronowski(1908-1974)—One of the early research fellows of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, he later spent two years (1971-1972) filming the justly famous BBC series The Ascent of Man, which traced the history of science and mankind from prehistoric times and which aired just shortly before his tragically premature death from heart failure.
McGeorge Bundy(1919-1996)—In 1966 he left the Lyndon Johnson White House to direct the Ford Corporation in New York for twelve years. During the following ten years he taught history at New York University, subsequently becoming a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation, where he chaired its Committee on Reducing Nuclear Dangers.
Dick Burgess(b. 1942)—Following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in Geneva, Switzerland, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is currently the James D. Watson Professor of Oncology.
John Cairns(b. 1922)—After leaving Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1972, he headed the Mill Hill Laboratory of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund outside London until 1980. He then recrossed the Atlantic to join the Harvard School of Public Health. Upon his retirement in 1991, he and his wife, Elfie, moved back to the United Kingdom, living outside Oxford.
Mario Capecchi(b. 1937)—After finishing his Ph.D. work, he stayed on at Harvard as assistant and then associate professor of biochemistry until 1973, when he moved to the University of Utah, where he has remained since. There he has pioneered gene targeting in mouse embryo-derived stem cells.
Erwin Chargaff(1905-2002)—More a writer than a scientist in the later part of his career, he published several books, including the autobiographical Hera-clitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature. He remained on the Columbia faculty until his retirement in 1974.
Seymour Cohen(b. 1917)—In 1971, he left the University of Pennsylvania for the University of Colorado in Denver, where he was a professor in the School of Medicine until 1976. He then moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, from which he retired in 1985.
Francis Crick(1916-2004)—At the age of sixty-one, he moved to the Salk Institute to pursue a new career as a neurobiologist, eventually to study the nature of consciousness with Caltech's Christof Koch. The already much valued biography, Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Atlas Books/ Harper Collins), by English scientist/writer Matt Ridley, appeared in mid-2006.
Manny Delbrück(1917-1998)—She continued to live at Caltech until her death from breast cancer.
Max Delbrück(1906-1981)—After 1957, his research turned to problems in sensory physiology, which he studied using the mold Phycomyces, until his death from multiple myeloma. In 1969, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Alfred Hershey and Salvador Luria for their work on bacteriophage.
Milislav Demerec(1895-1966)—Following his retirement at age sixty-five as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1960, he continued work on Salmonella genetics at Brookhaven National Laboratory until 1965.
August (Gus) Doermann(1918-1991)—After conducting research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he worked at Rochester and Vanderbilt before becoming professor of genetics at the University of Washington in 1964. His retirement years after 1982 were spent in the Canadian Yukon.
Paul Doty(b. 1920)—In his later career, he became increasingly involved in issues of international security, founding in 1973 what is now the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John E Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Renato Dulbecco(b. 1914)—After leaving Indiana University for Caltech in 1949, he began research on animal viruses, eventually to focus on tumor viruses as a founding member of the Salk Institute. His lab's finding that DNA tumor viruses cause cancer by inserting their genes into host cell DNA led to his sharing the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Later he became one of the earliest proponents of the Human Genome Project, saying that until the human genome was known we would not have the knowledge to beat cancer.
Julian Fleischman(b. 1933)—After finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1960, he went on to postdoctoral training at Stanford University and several other institutions. In 1963 he coauthored a paper proposing a detailed structure for the antibody molecule. He later joined the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he continues to study antibody structure, synthesis, and diversity.
Rosalind Franklin(1920-1958)—After moving to Birkbeck College in the spring of 1953, she worked on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus until her tragically premature death from ovarian cancer in 1958. Her life is the subject of Brenda Maddox's much acclaimed biography Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA.
Carleton Gajdusek(b. 1923)—He spent the majority of his career at the National Institutes of Health and received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the infectious nature and epidemiology of the prion disease kuru, which he studied in a population of South Fore people in the highlands of New Guinea beginning in the mid-1950s.
George (Geo) Gamow(1904-1968)—After a twenty-two-year career as professor of physics at George Washington University, he moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1956, where he worked until his death.
Ray Gesteland(b. 1938)—After spending his postdoctoral years in Geneva with Alfred Tissières, he came in 1967 to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he served as assistant director. In 1978 he moved to the University of Utah, where he is now vice president for research.
Celia Gilbert(b. 1932)—She now divides her time between painting, writing poetry, and taking delight in her children and grandchildren.
Wally Gilbert(b. 1932)—He received the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Frederick Sanger for their independent development of DNA sequencing methods. In 1982, he briefly left Harvard to run Biogen, the then Swiss-based biotechnology company he had helped found two years earlier. No longer running a research group as professor emeritus, he remains a senior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and continues to be closely involved with biotechnology. He also devotes much time to photography and classical antiquities.
Don Griffin(1915-2003)—After leaving Harvard's Biology Department in 1965, he moved on to Rockefeller University's field station for behavioral studies in Millbrook, north of New York City.
Gary Gussin(b. 1939)—After his postdoctoral years in Geneva, Switzerland, he joined the faculty of the University of Iowa, where he is currently professor of biological sciences.
Alfred Hershey(1908-1997)—In 1969 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his and Martha Chase's 1950 demonstration that phage DNA, not protein, is its genetic material. He retired in 1972 from active research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, continuing to live near the lab until his death.
Nancy Hopkins(b. 1943)—After joining the Center for Cancer Research at MIT in 1973, she pursued research on RNA tumor viruses. Switching her focus later to zebra fish, she developed a new method of insertional mutagenesis that identified hundreds of genes necessary for zebra fish development. In recent years she has promoted gender equity at MIT, where she is now the Amgen Professor of Biology.
Robert Hutchins(1899-1977)—After leaving the University of Chicago in 1951, he became associate director of the Ford Foundation and the chairman of its new Fund for the Republic. In 1959 he founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in California, which he led until his death.
Frangois Jacob(b. 1920)—After being awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with André Lwoff and Jacques Monod for their work on bacterial gene regulation, he has continued to work at the Institut Pasteur, where he served as chairman of the board from 1982 to 1988. Among his influential books are his autobiography, The Statue Within; The Logic of Life; and more recently Of Flies, Mice, and Men.
Herman Kalckar(1908-1991)—In 1952 he returned to the United States to work first at the National Institutes of Health, then at Johns Hopkins University, and finally, in 1961, at Harvard
Medical School, as head of the Biochemical Research Laboratory of Massachusetts General Hospital.
John Kendrew(1917-1997)—In the early 1970s he helped create the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, becoming its first director when it opened in 1974. He then served as president of St. John's College, Oxford, from 1981 to 1987.
Charles Kurland(b. 1936)—After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard, he moved on to a postdoctoral position at the Microbiology Institute of the University of Copenhagen. From there he moved to the University of Wisconsin and then in 1971 to Uppsala University in Sweden. He is now professor emeritus of its Department of Molecular Evolution as well as at the Department of Microbiology at the University of Lund.
Joshua Lederberg(b. 1925)—In 1959 he left the University of Wisconsin to found and chair the Department of Genetics at Stanford University; in 1978 he moved again to Rockefeller University in New York, where he served as president until his retirement in 1990. In 2006, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Salvador Luria(1912-1991)—He moved in 1959 from the University of Illinois to the Biology Department of MIT. In 1972, he was asked to plan the new Center for Cancer Research, an endeavor that involved remodeling a former chocolate factory into a laboratory building. He was its director from its opening in 1973 until 1985. In 1969 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey.
Ole Maaloe(1915-1988)—He moved from the State Serum Institute to the University of Copenhagen's Department of Microbiology, where he remained until his retirement.
Tom Maniatis(b. 1943)—He is currently the Thomas H. Lee Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, where his lab has in recent years focused on the regulation of eukaryotic gene expression, particularly in the immune response. In 1982 he co-founded, with Mark Ptashne, the biotech company Genetics Institute, now part of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and more recently Acceleron Pharma.
Ernst Mayr(1904-2005)—In 1975 he retired from the Harvard University faculty under the title Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology Emeritus. He went on to publish some two hundred articles and fourteen books between his official retirement and his death at the age of 100.
Barbara McClintock(1902-1992)—She became the sole recipient of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for her work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on the transposition of maize genes. Though she formally retired from the Carnegie Institution's Department of Genetics in 1967, she remained an important presence at the laboratory until her death at Huntington Hospital, near Cold Spring Harbor, at the age of ninety.
Matt Meselson(b. 1930)—He is currently the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University. Since the 1960s he has been highly involved in chemical and biological weapons and arms control, and is now director of the Harvard Sussex Program and Chair for CBW studies at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Avrion (Av) Mitchison(b. 1928)—In 1970, he left Mill Hill to become professor of zoology at University College, London, continuing to focus on immunology. Following his retirement from UCL, he worked for several years in Berlin before returning to London.
Naomi (Nou) Mitchison(1897-1999)—She continued to write well into her eighties, and died at Carradale, in western Scotland, at the age of 101. By then her life had been seriously compromised by Alzheimer's disease.
Jacques Monod(1910-1976)—He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with André Lwoff and Francois Jacob. His book-length essay Chance and Necessity, explaining life and evolution as a result of chance, was first published in 1970. Though he held positions at the University of Paris, Collège de France, and the Salk Institute, he centered his career at the Institut Pasteur, serving as its director from 1971 until his death of leukemia at his home in Cannes, France, at the age of sixty-six.
H. J. Muller(1890-1967)—He continued working with Drosophila at Indiana University for the remainder of his career.
Benno Müller-Hill(b. 1933)—In 1968, two years after isolating the lactose repressor with Wally Gilbert, he became a professor at the Institute for Genetics of the University of Cologne. In 1984, he published his revealing description of German eugenics, Todliche Wissenschaft, which sold fifteen thousand copies in Germany but received only one review in the German press. In 1988 its English translation, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945, was published by Oxford University Press, with a later 1998 edition published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
Betty (Watson) Myers(1930-1999)—She continued to live in Washington upon her husband Robert Myers's leaving government service to become publisher of The Washingtonian. In 1980 they moved to New York City, where he became president of the Carnegie Council on Religion and International Affairs, and they resided there until 1996, when they moved to Menlo Park, California, to be close to their daughters.
Masayasu Nomura(b. 1927)—In 1984, after twenty years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he moved to the University of California, Irvine, where he still runs an active research group that studies RNA synthesis in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Aaron Novick(1919-2000)—He moved from the University of Chicago to the University of Oregon in 1959 to become the founding director of its Institute of Molecular Biology. At Oregon, he went on to serve as dean of the Graduate School and head of the Biology Department.
Linus Pauling(1901-1994)—He left Caltech shortly after winning the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for his activism against nuclear testing and proliferation. He spent the next decade at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California (1963-1967); the University of California, San Diego (1967-1969); and Stanford University (1969-1974). In 1973 he founded the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto, California, where he conducted research on the effects of common micro nutrients on human health. He died of cancer at his ranch in Big Sur, California.
Peter Pauling(b. 1931-2003)—He was a lecturer in physical chemistry at University College London from 1958 to 1989. After his retirement he lived in Wales until his death.
Max Perutz(1914-2002)—He served as chairman of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University from its inception in 1962 until 1979, the year he officially retired. He continued to work at the Laboratory practically every day after his retirement until his death of cancer at the age of eighty-seven. Increasingly he was celebrated as a skilled writer, publishing many articles in The New York Review of Books. Collections of his essays were also published in book form: Is Science Necessary? (Oxford University Press, 1991) and I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998 and 2003).
Ulf Pettersson(b. 1942)—He is currently vice rector of the Disciplinary Domain for Medicine and Pharmacy and professor in the Department of Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Princess Christina(b. 1943)—She married Tord Gösta Magnuson in 1974 and became known as Princess Christina, Mrs. Magnuson. She currently lives in Stockholm.
Mark Ptashne(b. 1940)—After isolating the lambda phage repressor in 1967, his continued research yielded a detailed picture of genetic regulation in lambda. More recently he has focused on transcriptional regulation in yeast. In 1997, he moved to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he is currently the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology.
Edward Pulling(1898-1991)—He continued to live at Redcote after the death of his wife, Lucy, in 1979, remaining as chairman of the Long Island Biological Association until early 1986. Afterward, he took much pleasure from writing about earlier years in his life.
Nathan Pusey(1907-2001)—After retiring early from Harvard in 1971, he moved to New York City to serve for several years as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
J. T. (Sir John) Randall(1905-1984)—In 1970 he reti
red as the first director of the Biophysics unit at King's College, London, which was soon to be renamed the Randall Institute and is now the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics.
Alex Rich(b. 1924)—He spent four years at the National Institutes of Health before moving in 1954 to MIT, where he continued work on nucleic acids, in particular their 3-D structures. He was honored with the National Medal of Science in 1995 and still maintains an active research career as MIT's William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics.
John Richardson(b. 1938)—After post-doctoral research at the Institut Pasteur, he joined the faculty of Indiana University, Bloomington, where his research continues to focus on RNA synthesis from DNA templates.
Bob Risebrough(b. 1935)—After Harvard, he pursued a career as a conservation biologist. He lives in California, working at the Bodega Bay Institute and most recently focusing his research on the endangered California condor.
Keith Roberts(b. 1945)—He remains at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, where he served for ten years as head of its Cell Biology Department. In 1983 he helped author the widely used Molecular Biology of the Cell, now in its fifth edition.
Rich Roberts(b. 1943)—He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phil Sharp for their independent 1977 discovery of RNA splicing, using adenovirus DNA. While at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his lab discovered some one hundred new restriction enzymes. In 1992 he moved to New England Biolabs, a major provider of research reagents, where he is currently chief scientific officer.
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