biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1938– )
|
| biography:
| Virologist and geneticist, born in New York City, New York, USA. He was a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1963–4) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1964–5), then moved to the Salk Institute of Biological Studies (1965–8), where he began investigations of RNA viruses. He returned to MIT (1968–90), where he discovered a tumor virus enzyme he termed ‘reverse transcriptase’ which can transform the host cell's DNA into cancer-causing viral RNA (1970). For this work he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. In 1972 he synthesized part of the gene for haemoglobin, then worked on developing synthetic vaccines. An outspoken advocate of self-policing of genetic engineering by scientists, he became president of Rockefeller University (1990), but resigned (1991) after an extensive controversy resulted from his attempt to impede an investigation of a paper he had sponsored (1986) by a former MIT postdoctoral researcher who had falsified her data. |
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