Sherman Weissman

Sherman Morton Weissman is an American scientist and the Sterling Professor of Genetics at the Yale School of Medicine.

Biography

After attending Harvard Medical School, Weissman interned at Boston City Hospital and was a research fellow with the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute before taking a faculty position at Yale.[1] Weissman mentored Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, during Collins's postdoctoral fellowship at Yale.[2] Collins called Weissman "the smartest guy" he has met[3] and credited Weissman with allowing him to establish autonomy as a researcher. In Weissman's lab, Collins developed the technique known as chromosome jumping.[4]

In 1978, Weissman published the complete nucleic acid sequence of the SV40 genome. A week later, Belgian researcher Walter Fiers published the genome sequence in another journal. Until  1 1⁄2 years earlier, the Weissman and Fiers teams had each been working on separate halves of the sequence. As technology allowed for faster sequencing, each team began to work toward sequencing the entire genome on its own. In the months before he came up with the published sequence, Weissman had to retract several "final" sequences once errors were discovered.[5] Weissman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983.[6]

Weissman's son, Jonathan Weissman, is a molecular biologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco.[7]

References

  1. ↑ Sherman Morton Weissman, MD. Yale School of Medicine. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
  2. ↑ Gosselin, Peter (June 27, 2000). "Public project's chief: Quiet but no pushover". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
  3. ↑ Davies, Kevin (2002). Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 70. ISBN 0801871409. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
  4. ↑ Collins, Francis (October 7, 2010). "Scientists need a shorter path to research freedom". Nature. 467 (7316): 635–635. doi:10.1038/467635a. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
  5. ↑ "Science loses in researchers' race". New Scientist. May 11, 1978. p. 347.
  6. ↑ "Sherman M. Weissman". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
  7. ↑ "Meet Jonathan Weissman". American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. March 2014. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 4/8/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.