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Bruce Alberts

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Bruce Michael Alberts (born April 14, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American biochemist and the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education, Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He has done important work studying the protein complexes which enable chromosome replication when living cells divide. He is known as an original author of the "canonical, influential, and best-selling scientific textbook" Molecular Biology of the Cell and as Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine.

Alberts was the president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1993 to 2005. He is known for his work in forming science public policy and has served as United States Science Envoy to Pakistan and Indonesia. He has stated that "Science education should be about learning to think and solve problems like a scientist—insisting, for all citizens, that statements be evaluated using evidence and logic the way scientists evaluate statements." He is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.

After graduating from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, Alberts attended Harvard College as a pre-medicine major. Bored by the assigned laboratory "cooking classes," he petitioned to skip the physical chemistry laboratory requirement and instead was allowed to work with his tutor Jacques Fresco in Paul M. Doty's laboratory. The summer's research led to the publication of two successful papers on mismatch errors in the helical structures of DNA and RNA, and Alberts decided to continue on in biophysics. He graduated with his A.B. in biochemical sciences, summa cum laude, in 1960.

Alberts then worked with Paul M. Doty on "enormously ambitious" Ph.D. thesis projects, first attempting to solve the genetic code using nearest neighbor analysis after treatment of DNA with various mutagens, and then trying to test his theoretical model for how DNA polymerase could replicate a double-helical DNA template. After failing his first oral examination in the spring of 1965, he completed his Ph.D. research in the fall of 1965. His doctorate in biophysics was finally awarded by Harvard University in 1966. Alberts credits his initial failure with teaching him much more than his successes. "That was a very important learning experience for me. I had decided that experimental strategy was everything in science, and nobody had ever told me anything about this."

After graduating, Alberts went to the Institut de Biologie Moléculaire at the University of Geneva as a postdoctoral fellow and worked with Richard H. Epstein on genes involved in the DNA replication of phage T4. Epstein and his students had shown that there were at least seven different proteins needed for the replication of T4 DNA. Alberts decided to do something that no one else was doing and developed a DNA column for the purification of proteins that bound to DNA. This enabled him to purify the T4 Bacteriophage Gene 32 protein, thus identifying the first single-stranded DNA binding protein – a type of protein now known to be present in all cells.

In 1966, Alberts joined the Department of Biochemical Sciences at Princeton University as an Assistant Professor. In 1971, he became an Associate Professor and, in 1973, a full Professor, holding the Damon Pfeiffer Professorship in life sciences from 1975 to 1976. At Princeton, he continued to work in the area of protein biochemistry, eventually reconstituting a DNA replication system in a test tube from seven purified proteins.

In 1976, Alberts accepted a position as professor and vice-chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. Also, in 1976, he and his students were able to add all seven proteins to double-stranded DNA in an appropriate magnesium concentration to make DNA. More years of research were spent understanding the details of the reactions involved in the 7-protein “machine” that replicated DNA. Another important step in understanding DNA synthesis was the discovery that the leading strand DNA polymerase and lagging strand DNA polymerase were coupled.

Alberts was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. From 1981 to 1985, Alberts held an American Cancer Society Research Professorship, a title granted for life as of 1980. From 1985 to 1990, he was Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. From 1990 to 1993, he again held an American Cancer Society Research Professorship.

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Molecular Biology of the Cell

Sam Altman
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