List of participants in the Evolving Genes and Proteins symposium
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This is a list of scientists who participated in the 1964 Evolving Genes and Proteins symposium, a landmark event in the history of molecular evolution. The symposium, supported by the National Science Foundation, took place on September 17 and September 18, 1964 at the Institute of Microbiology of Rutgers University. A summary of the proceedings was published in Science, and the full proceedings were edited by Vernon Bryson and Henry J. Vogel and published in 1965.[1]
Part III, Evolution of Proteins I: "Evolutionary Divergence and Convergence in Proteins"
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Carl Richard Woese was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea in 1977 through a pioneering phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology. He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The choanoflagellates are a group of free-living unicellular and colonial flagellate eukaryotes considered to be the closest living relatives of the animals. Choanoflagellates are collared flagellates, having a funnel shaped collar of interconnected microvilli at the base of a flagellum. Choanoflagellates are capable of both asexual and sexual reproduction. They have a distinctive cell morphology characterized by an ovoid or spherical cell body 3–10 µm in diameter with a single apical flagellum surrounded by a collar of 30–40 microvilli. Movement of the flagellum creates water currents that can propel free-swimming choanoflagellates through the water column and trap bacteria and detritus against the collar of microvilli, where these foodstuffs are engulfed. This feeding provides a critical link within the global carbon cycle, linking trophic levels. In addition to their critical ecological roles, choanoflagellates are of particular interest to evolutionary biologists studying the origins of multicellularity in animals. As the closest living relatives of animals, choanoflagellates serve as a useful model for reconstructions of the last unicellular ancestor of animals.
Charles Yanofsky was an American geneticist on the faculty of Stanford University who contributed to the establishment of the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis and discovered attenuation, a riboswitch mechanism in which messenger RNA changes shape in response to a small molecule and thus alters its binding ability for the regulatory region of a gene or operon.
Émile Zuckerkandl was an Austrian-born French biologist considered one of the founders of the field of molecular evolution. He introduced, with Linus Pauling, the concept of the "molecular clock", which enabled the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Sir Henry Harris was an Australian professor of medicine at the University of Oxford who led pioneering work on cancer and human genetics in the 2000s.
Thomas Eugene Shenk is an American virologist. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University.
Jan T. Vilček is a biomedical scientist, educator, inventor and philanthropist. He is a professor in the department of microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine, and chairman and CEO of The Vilcek Foundation. Vilček, a native of Bratislava, Slovakia, received his M.D. degree from Comenius University Medical School, Bratislava in 1957; and his Ph.D. in Virology from the Institute of Virology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1962. In 1964, Vilček, with his wife Marica, defected from Communist Czechoslovakia during a three-day visit to Vienna. In 1965, the Vilčeks immigrated to the United States, and have since lived in New York City. Vilček devoted his scientific career to studies of soluble mediators that regulate the immune system (cytokines), including interferon and tumor necrosis factor (TNF).
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.
Evelyn M. Witkin is an American geneticist who was awarded the National Medal of Science for her work on DNA mutagenesis and DNA repair.
Ralph Lawrence Brinster is an American geneticist, National Medal of Science laureate, and Richard King Mellon Professor of Reproductive Physiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
Joachim Wilhelm "Jo" Messing was a German-American biologist who was a professor of molecular biology and the fourth director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University.
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Jack Leonard Strominger is the Higgins Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard University, specializing in the structure and function of human histocompatibility proteins and their role in disease. He won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995.
Richard High Ebright is an American molecular biologist. He is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology.
Peter Guy Wolynes is an American theoretical chemist and physicist. Since 2011 he has been a Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science and professor of chemistry at Rice University. He is widely recognized for his significant contributions to the theories of protein folding, glasses, and gene networks. Previously he was James R. Eiszner Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Francis H.C. Crick Chair of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
Ekkehard Karl Friedrich Bautz is a molecular biologist and chair of the Institute of Molecular Genetics at the University of Heidelberg.
Joram Piatigorsky is an American molecular biologist and eye researcher. He was the founding chief of the Laboratory of Molecular and Developmental Biology, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health (1981–2009). He is the recipient of the 2008 Helen Keller Prize for Vision Research.
Patricia Jean Johnson is a Professor of Microbiology at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She works on the parasite Trichomonas vaginalis, which is responsible for the most prevalent sexually transmitted infections in the United States, Trichomoniasis. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2019.
Eileen White is an American professor and scientist who currently serves as deputy director, chief scientific officer, and associate director for basic science at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. She is also the distinguished professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University. White was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
References
↑ Vernon Bryson and Henry J. Vogel, editors. Evolving Genes and Proteins: A Symposium Held at the Institute of Microbiology of Rutgers, The State University, with support from the National Science Foundation. Academic Press: New York, 1965
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