James E. Darnell

Last updated
James E. Darnell
James E. Darnell.jpg
James E. Darnell receiving the 2002 National Medal of Science
Born (1930-09-09) September 9, 1930 (age 92)
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma mater
Known for
  • Original discovery of RNA processing in eukaryotes.
  • Determined how extracellular proteins (cytokines) stimulates nuclear gene expression.
Awards Albany Medical Center Prize (2012) [2]
Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award (2002)
National Medal of Science (2002) [3]
E.B. Wilson Medal (1998)
Canada Gairdner International Award (1986) [4]
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions

James Edwin Darnell Jr. (born September 9, 1930, Columbus, Mississippi) [5] is an American biologist who made significant contributions to RNA processing and cytokine signaling and is author of the cell biology textbook Molecular Cell Biology.

Contents

In 2004, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. [6]

Since 2013, Darnell has been listed on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education. [7]

He is married to Norwegian former model and dress shop owner Kristin Holby, known as "Clotilde", whose daughter Phoebe, a financial analyst, is married to businessman Divya Narendra. [8]

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Günter Blobel</span> German American biologist (1999 Nobel Prize)

Günter Blobel was a Silesian German and American biologist and 1999 Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rockefeller University</span> Private biomedical research university in New York City, United States

The Rockefeller University is a private biomedical research and graduate-only university in New York City, New York. It focuses primarily on the biological and medical sciences and provides doctoral and postdoctoral education. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity." Rockefeller is the oldest biomedical research institute in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H. Robert Horvitz</span> American biologist

Howard Robert Horvitz ForMemRS NAS AAA&S APS NAM is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".

Ronald Mark Evans is an American Biologist, Professor and Head of the Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory, and the March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Dr. Ronald M. Evans is known for his original discoveries of nuclear hormone receptors (NR), a special class of transcriptional factor, and the elucidation of their universal mechanism of action, a process that governs how lipophilic hormones and drugs regulate virtually every developmental and metabolic pathway in animals and humans. Nowadays, NRs are among the most widely investigated group of pharmaceutical targets in the world, already yielding benefits in drug discovery for cancer, muscular dystrophies, osteoporosis, type II diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases. His current research focuses on the function of nuclear hormone signaling and their function in metabolism and cancer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph L. Goldstein</span> American biochemist

Joseph Leonard Goldstein ForMemRS is an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas Southwestern researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood and that when LDL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesterolemia and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases, notably coronary heart disease. Their studies led to the development of statin drugs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert G. Roeder</span>

Robert G. Roeder is an American biochemist. He is known as a pioneer scientist in eukaryotic transcription. He discovered three distinct nuclear RNA polymerases in 1969 and characterized many proteins involved in the regulation of transcription, including basic transcription factors and the first mammalian gene-specific activator over five decades of research. He is the recipient of the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2000, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2003, and the Kyoto Prize in 2021. He currently serves as Arnold and Mabel Beckman Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Biochemical and Molecular Biology at The Rockefeller University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pamela J. Bjorkman</span> American biochemist

Pamela Jane Bjorkman NAS, AAAS is an American biochemist. She is the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Her research centers on the study of the three-dimensional structures of proteins related to Class I MHC, or Major Histocompatibility Complex, proteins of the immune system and proteins involved in the immune responses to viruses. Bjorkman is most well known as a pioneer in the field of structural biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles David Allis</span> American molecular biologist (1951–2023)

Charles David Allis was an American molecular biologist, and the Joy and Jack Fishman Professor and head of the Laboratory of Chromatin Biology and Epigenetics at The Rockefeller University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keith R. Porter</span>

Keith Roberts Porter was a Canadian-American cell biologist. He created pioneering biology techniques and research using electron microscopy of cells. Porter also contributed to the development of other experimental methods for cell culture and nuclear transplantation. He was also responsible for naming the endoplasmic reticulum, conducting work on the 9 + 2 microtubule structure in the axoneme of cilia, and coining the term "microtrabecular lattice." In collaborations with other scientists, he contributed to the understanding of cellular structures and concepts such as compartmentalization, flagella, centrioles, fibrin, collagen, T-tubules and sarcoplasmic reticulum. He also introduced microtome cutting

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey M. Friedman</span>

Jeffrey M. Friedman is a molecular geneticist at New York City's Rockefeller University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His discovery of the hormone leptin and its role in regulating body weight has had a major role in the area of human obesity. Friedman is a physician scientist studying the genetic mechanisms that regulate body weight. His research on various aspects of obesity received national attention in late 1994, when it was announced that he and his colleagues had isolated the mouse ob gene and its human homologue. They subsequently found that injections of the encoded protein, leptin, decreases body weight of mice by reducing food intake and increasing energy expenditure. Current research is aimed at understanding the genetic basis of obesity in human and the mechanisms by which leptin transmits its weight-reducing signal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan A. Steitz</span> American biochemist

Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins (snRNPs), which occur in eukaryotes. In September 2018, Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The Lasker award is often referred to as the 'American Nobel' because 87 of the former recipients have gone on to win Nobel prizes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elaine Fuchs</span> American biologist

Elaine V. Fuchs is an American cell biologist famous for her work on the biology and molecular mechanisms of mammalian skin and skin diseases, who helped lead the modernization of dermatology. Fuchs pioneered reverse genetics approaches, which assess protein function first and then assess its role in development and disease. In particular, Fuchs researches skin stem cells and their production of hair and skin. She is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development at The Rockefeller University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur L. Horwich</span> American biologist (born 1951)

Arthur L. Horwich is an American biologist and Sterling Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. Horwich has also been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1990. His research into protein folding uncovered the action of chaperonins, protein complexes that assist the folding of other proteins; Horwich first published this work in 1989.

Franz-Ulrich Hartl is a German biochemist and Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He is known for his pioneering work in the field of protein-mediated protein folding and is a recipient of the 2011 Lasker Award along with Arthur L. Horwich.

Arnold Jay Levine, is an American Molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1998 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry and was the first recipient of the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research in 2001 for his discovery of the tumor suppressor protein p53.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce William Stillman</span> Australian biochemist and cancer researcher

Bruce William Stillman, AO, FAA, FRS is a biochemist and cancer researcher who has served as the Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) since 1994 and President since 2003. He also served as the Director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center for 25 years from 1992 to 2016. During his leadership, CSHL has been ranked as the No. 1 institution in molecular biology and genetics research by Thomson Reuters. Stillman's research focuses on how chromosomes are duplicated in human cells and in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae; the mechanisms that ensure accurate inheritance of genetic material from one generation to the next; and how missteps in this process lead to cancer. For his accomplishments, Stillman has received numerous awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize in 2004 and the 2010 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, both of which he shared with Thomas J. Kelly of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, as well as the 2019 Canada Gairdner International Award for biomedical research, which he shared with John Diffley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucy Shapiro</span> American developmental biologist

Lucy Shapiro is an American developmental biologist. She is a professor of Developmental Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and the director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynne E. Maquat</span> American biochemist

Lynne Elizabeth Maquat is an American biochemist and molecular biologist whose research focuses on the cellular mechanisms of human disease. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. She currently holds the J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, pediatrics and of oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Professor Maquat is also Founding Director of the Center for RNA Biology and Founding Chair of Graduate Women in Science at the University of Rochester.

Jeffrey Victor Ravetch is a professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Immunology at The Rockefeller University.

Susan M. Gasser is a Swiss molecular biologist. She was the Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, from 2004 - 2019, where she also led a research group from 2004 until 2021. She was in parallel Professor of molecular biology at the University of Basel until April 2021. Since January 2021, Susan Gasser is Director of the ISREC Foundation, based in Lausanne, and is Professor invité at the University of Lausanne in the Department of Fundamental Microbiology. She is an expert in quantitative biology and studies epigenetic inheritance and genome stability.

References

  1. Strong, Colby (June 11, 1990). "People: James E. Darnell, Jr., Is Appointed Chief Academic Officer At Rockefeller University". The Scientist. 4 (12).
  2. "'Towering Figures' in Cell Research to Share Albany Medical Center Prize". Albany Medical Center. Retrieved 11 February 2015.
  3. "President's National Medal of Science, James E. Darnell". National Science Foundation. Retrieved 25 November 2014.
  4. "Canada Gairdner International Award Recipient James E. Darnell MD". Gairdner Foundation. Retrieved 25 November 2014.
  5. Laureates of the 2002 National Medal of Science
  6. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  7. "Advisory Council". ncse.com. National Center for Science Education. Archived from the original on 2013-08-10. Retrieved 2018-10-30.
  8. Seymour, Lesley Jane (29 July 2007). "Swap Those Jeans for a Dress, Soccer Mom". The New York Times.
  9. National Science Foundation - The President's National Medal of Science


  1. "Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology". The Rockefeller University. Retrieved 12 February 2015.