Sir Martin Evans | |
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Born | Martin John Evans 1 January 1941 Stroud, Gloucestershire, England |
Education |
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Known for | Discovering embryonic stem cells, and development of the knockout mouse and gene targeting. |
Spouse | Judith Clare Williams MBE (m. 1966) |
Children | Two sons and one daughter [1] |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Developmental biology |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Studies on the ribonucleic acid of early amphibian embryos |
Doctoral students | Allan Bradley [2] [3] Elizabeth Robertson |
Website | cardiff |
Sir Martin John Evans FRS FMedSci FLSW (born 1 January 1941) is an English biologist [5] who, with Matthew Kaufman, was the first to culture mice embryonic stem cells and cultivate them in a laboratory in 1981. He is also known, along with Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, for his work in the development of the knockout mouse and the related technology of gene targeting, a method of using embryonic stem cells to create specific gene modifications in mice. [6] [7] In 2007, the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of their discovery and contribution to the efforts to develop new treatments for illnesses in humans. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
He won a major scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge at a time when advances in genetics were occurring there and became interested in biology and biochemistry.[ citation needed ] He then went to University College London where he learned laboratory skills supervised by Elizabeth Deuchar. In 1978, he moved to the Department of Genetics, at the University of Cambridge, and in 1980 began his collaboration with Matthew Kaufman. They explored the method of using blastocysts for the isolation of embryonic stem cells. After Kaufman left, Evans continued his work, upgrading his laboratory skills to the newest technologies, isolated the embryonic stem cell of the early mouse embryo and established it in a cell culture. He genetically modified and implanted it into adult female mice with the intent of creating genetically modified offspring, work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. [13] Today, genetically modified mice are considered vital for medical research.
Evans was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, on 1 January 1941. [1] [6] His mother was a teacher. [9] His father maintained a mechanical workshop and taught Evans to use tools and machines including a lathe. [9] Evans was close to his grandfather who was a choir master at a Baptist Church for over 40 years, and whose main interests were music, poetry, and the Baptist Church. [9] His mother's brother was a professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge. [9] As a boy Evans was quiet, shy and inquisitive. [11] He liked science, and his parents encouraged his education. [9] He remembers loving old science books and receiving an electric experimental set which he wanted for Christmas. [11] He attributes to a chemistry set, from which he learned basic chemistry, for the development of one of his "greatest amateur passions". [11] He went to middle school at St Dunstan's College, [9] an independent school for boys in South East London, where he started chemistry and physics classes, and studied biology. [11] He worked hard studying for the University of Cambridge entrance exams. At school he was one of the best pupils, although not at the top of the class. [9]
Evans won a major scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge, at a time when there were many advances in genetics being made. He studied zoology, botany and chemistry, but soon dropped zoology and added biochemistry, finding himself drawn to plant physiology and function. [11] He went to seminars by Sydney Brenner and attended lectures by Jacques Monod. [9] He graduated from Christ's College with a BA in 1963; although, he did not take his final examinations, because he was ill with glandular fever. [6] [7] He decided on a career examining genetic control of vertebrate development. [14] He moved to University College London where he had a fortunate position as a research assistant, learning laboratory skills under Dr Elizabeth Deuchar. His goal at the time was "to isolate developmentally controlled m-RNA". [11] He was awarded a PhD in 1969. [15] [1] [6] [16]
He became a lecturer in the Anatomy and Embryology department at University College London, where he did research and taught PhD students and undergraduates. [16] In 1978, he moved to the Department of Genetics, at the University of Cambridge, where his work in association with Matthew Kaufman began in 1980. [6] They developed the idea of using blastocysts for the isolation of embryonic stem cells. [17]
After Kaufman left to take up a professorship in Anatomy in Edinburgh, Evans continued his work, branching out eclectically, "drawn into a number of fascinating fields of biology and medicine." [11] In October 1985, he visited the Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for one month of practical work to learn the most recent laboratory techniques. [7] [18]
In the 1990s, he was a fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. In 1999, he became Professor of Mammalian Genetics and Director of the School of Biosciences at Cardiff University, [6] [19] where he worked until he retired at the end of 2007. [20] He became a Knight Bachelor in the 2004 New Year Honours in recognition of his work in stem cell research. [6] [21] He received the accolade from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace on 25 June 2004. [22] In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies for their work in discovering a method for introducing homologous recombination in mice employing embryonic stem cells. [8] Evans was appointed president of Cardiff University and was inaugurated into that position on 23 November 2009. [23] Subsequently, Evans became Chancellor of Cardiff University in 2012. [24] He is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge. [25]
Evans and Kaufman isolated the embryonic stem cells from early embryos (embryoblasts) of mice and established them in cell cultures. These early embryonic cells have the potential to differentiate into any of the cells of the adult organism. They modified these stem cells genetically and placed them in the wombs of female mice so they would give birth to genetically modified offspring. [26]
In 1981, Evans and Kaufman published results for experiments in which they described how they isolated embryonic stem cells from mouse blastocysts and grew them in cell cultures. [26] [27] This was also achieved by Gail R. Martin, independently, in the same year. [28] Eventually, Evans was able to isolate the embryonic stem cell of the early mouse embryo and establish it in a cell culture. He then genetically modified it and implanted it into adult female mice with the intent of creating genetically modified offspring, the forebears of the laboratory mice that are considered so vital to medical research today. [26] The availability of these cultured stem cells eventually made possible the introduction of specific gene alterations into the germ line of mice and the creation of transgenic mice to use as experimental models for human illnesses. [26]
Evans and his collaborators showed that they could introduce a new gene into cultured embryonic stem cells and then use such genetically transformed cells to make chimeric embryos. [29] In some chimeric embryos, the genetically altered stem cells produced gametes, thus allowing transmission of the artificially induced mutation into future generations of mice. [30] In this way, transgenic mice with induced mutations in the enzyme Hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase (HPRT) were created. [31] The HPRT mutations were produced by retroviral insertion; it was proposed that by taking advantage of genetic recombination between the normal HPRT gene and an artificial gene sequenced added to the cultured embryonic stem cells, "it may also eventually be possible to produce specific alterations in endogenous genes through homologous recombination with cloned copies modified in vitro". [26] The production of transgenic mice using this proposed approach was accomplished in the laboratories of Oliver Smithies, [32] and of Mario Capecchi. [33]
When Evans was a student in Cambridge he met his wife, Judith Clare Williams, [1] at a lunch held by his aunt, wife of an astronomy professor. [9] After they were engaged, their relationship did not go well and Judith went to live in Canada; however, a year later she returned to England and they married. [9] In 1978, they moved from London to Cambridge with their young children, where they lived for more than 20 years before moving to Cardiff. They have one daughter and two sons. [1] [34] Their older son was a student at the University of Cambridge and their younger son was a boarder at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford and sang in Christ Church Cathedral choir. [9] Martin's granddaughter has graduated from the University of Nottingham and is now a practicing medicine Yorkshire and Humber.
His wife Judith Clare Williams, granddaughter of Christopher Williams, was appointed MBE for her services to practice nursing in the 1993 New Year Honours. [35] [36] She was diagnosed with breast cancer at about the time the family moved to Cardiff. She works for breast cancer charities, and Martin Evans has become a trustee of Breakthrough Breast Cancer. [9]
Evans has won numerous awards including:
Gene knockouts are a widely used genetic engineering technique that involves the targeted removal or inactivation of a specific gene within an organism's genome. This can be done through a variety of methods, including homologous recombination, CRISPR-Cas9, and TALENs.
Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are pluripotent stem cells derived from the inner cell mass of a blastocyst, an early-stage pre-implantation embryo. Human embryos reach the blastocyst stage 4–5 days post fertilization, at which time they consist of 50–150 cells. Isolating the inner cell mass (embryoblast) using immunosurgery results in destruction of the blastocyst, a process which raises ethical issues, including whether or not embryos at the pre-implantation stage have the same moral considerations as embryos in the post-implantation stage of development.
Mario Ramberg Capecchi is an Italian-born molecular geneticist and a co-awardee of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice. He shared the prize with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Fox Chase Cancer Center is a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center research facility and hospital located in the Fox Chase section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The main facilities of the center are located on property adjoining Burholme Park. The center is part of the Temple University Health System (TUHS) and specializes in the treatment and prevention of cancer.
The stem cell controversy concerns the ethics of research involving the development and use of human embryos. Most commonly, this controversy focuses on embryonic stem cells. Not all stem cell research involves human embryos. For example, adult stem cells, amniotic stem cells, and induced pluripotent stem cells do not involve creating, using, or destroying human embryos, and thus are minimally, if at all, controversial. Many less controversial sources of acquiring stem cells include using cells from the umbilical cord, breast milk, and bone marrow, which are not pluripotent.
Oliver Smithies was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and for the discovery, simultaneously with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, of the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA, a much more reliable method of altering animal genomes than previously used, and the technique behind gene targeting and knockout mice. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for his genetics work.
Rudolf Jaenisch is a Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is a pioneer of transgenic science, in which an animal’s genetic makeup is altered. Jaenisch has focused on creating genetically modified mice to study cancer, epigenetic reprogramming and neurological diseases.
Gene targeting is a biotechnological tool used to change the DNA sequence of an organism. It is based on the natural DNA-repair mechanism of Homology Directed Repair (HDR), including Homologous Recombination. Gene targeting can be used to make a range of sizes of DNA edits, from larger DNA edits such as inserting entire new genes into an organism, through to much smaller changes to the existing DNA such as a single base-pair change. Gene targeting relies on the presence of a repair template to introduce the user-defined edits to the DNA. The user will design the repair template to contain the desired edit, flanked by DNA sequence corresponding (homologous) to the region of DNA that the user wants to edit; hence the edit is targeted to a particular genomic region. In this way Gene Targeting is distinct from natural homology-directed repair, during which the ‘natural’ DNA repair template of the sister chromatid is used to repair broken DNA. The alteration of DNA sequence in an organism can be useful in both a research context – for example to understand the biological role of a gene – and in biotechnology, for example to alter the traits of an organism.
Conditional gene knockout is a technique used to eliminate a specific gene in a certain tissue, such as the liver. This technique is useful to study the role of individual genes in living organisms. It differs from traditional gene knockout because it targets specific genes at specific times rather than being deleted from beginning of life. Using the conditional gene knockout technique eliminates many of the side effects from traditional gene knockout. In traditional gene knockout, embryonic death from a gene mutation can occur, and this prevents scientists from studying the gene in adults. Some tissues cannot be studied properly in isolation, so the gene must be inactive in a certain tissue while remaining active in others. With this technology, scientists are able to knockout genes at a specific stage in development and study how the knockout of a gene in one tissue affects the same gene in other tissues.
Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company developing treatments for human disease. The company was founded in 1995 in The Woodlands, Texas under the name Lexicon Genetics, Incorporated by co-founders Professor Allan Bradley, FRS and Professor Bradley's postdoctoral fellow Arthur T Sands. The company has used its patented mouse gene knockout technology and extensive in vivo screening capabilities to study nearly 5,000 genes in its Genome5000 program and has identified over 100 potential therapeutic targets. Lexicon has advanced multiple drug candidates into human clinical trials and has a broad and diverse pipeline of drug targets behind its clinical programs. Lexicon is pursuing drug targets in five therapeutic areas including oncology, gastroenterology, immunology, metabolism, and ophthalmology.
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.
Matthew H. Kaufman was a British biologist. He was Professor Emeritus at University of Edinburgh having been Professor of Anatomy there from 1985 to 2007. He taught anatomy and embryology for more than 30 years, initially at the University of Cambridge, when he was a Fellow of King's College, and more recently in Edinburgh.
Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese stem cell researcher and a Nobel Prize laureate. He is a professor and the director emeritus of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, Kyoto University; as a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California; and as a professor of anatomy at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Yamanaka is also a past president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).
Gail Roberta Martin is an American biologist. She is professor emerita in the Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco. She is known for her pioneering work on the isolation of pluripotent stem cells from normal embryos, for which she coined the term 'embryonic stem cells'. She is widely recognized for her work on the function of fibroblast growth factors and their negative regulators in vertebrate organogenesis. She and her colleagues made contributions to gene targeting technology.
In molecular cloning and biology, a gene knock-in refers to a genetic engineering method that involves the one-for-one substitution of DNA sequence information in a genetic locus or the insertion of sequence information not found within the locus. Typically, this is done in mice since the technology for this process is more refined and there is a high degree of shared sequence complexity between mice and humans. The difference between knock-in technology and traditional transgenic techniques is that a knock-in involves a gene inserted into a specific locus, and is thus a "targeted" insertion. It is the opposite of gene knockout.
A genetically modified mouse, genetically engineered mouse model (GEMM) or transgenic mouse is a mouse that has had its genome altered through the use of genetic engineering techniques. Genetically modified mice are commonly used for research or as animal models of human diseases and are also used for research on genes. Together with patient-derived xenografts (PDXs), GEMMs are the most common in vivo models in cancer research. Both approaches are considered complementary and may be used to recapitulate different aspects of disease. GEMMs are also of great interest for drug development, as they facilitate target validation and the study of response, resistance, toxicity and pharmacodynamics.
A knockout mouse, or knock-out mouse, is a genetically modified mouse in which researchers have inactivated, or "knocked out", an existing gene by replacing it or disrupting it with an artificial piece of DNA. They are important animal models for studying the role of genes which have been sequenced but whose functions have not been determined. By causing a specific gene to be inactive in the mouse, and observing any differences from normal behaviour or physiology, researchers can infer its probable function.
Allan Bradley FRS is a British geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Elizabeth Jane Robertson is a British developmental biologist based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. She is Professor of Developmental Biology at Oxford and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. She is best known for her pioneering work in developmental genetics, showing that genetic mutations could be introduced into the mouse germ line by using genetically altered embryonic stem cells. This discovery opened up a major field of experimentation for biologists and clinicians.
Nobuyo N. Maeda is a Japanese geneticist and medical researcher, who works on complex human diseases including atherosclerosis, diabetes and high blood pressure, and is particularly known for creating the first mouse model for atherosclerosis. Maeda has worked in the United States since 1978; as of 2017, she is the Robert H. Wagner Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.