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Cell Biology Education, 2013
I was invited to write this essay on the occasion of my selection as the recipient of the 2012 Bruce Alberts Award for Excellence in Science Education from the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). Receiving this award is an enormous honor. When I read the email announcement for the first time, it was more than a surprise to me, it was unbelievable. I joined ASCB in 1996, when I presented a poster and received a travel award. Since then, I have attended almost every ASCB meeting. I will try to use this essay to share with readers one of the best experiences in my life. Because this is an essay, I take the liberty of mixing some of my thoughts with data in a way that it not usual in scientific writing. I hope that this sacrifice of the format will achieve the goal of conveying what I have learned over the past 20 yr, during which time a group of colleagues and friends created a nexus of knowledge and wisdom. We have worked together to build a network capable of sharing and inspir...
From Cytometry to Cell Cycle—A Portrait of Zbigniew Darzynkiewicz
Cell Cycle, 2004
As indicated by his somewhat elaborate Slavic name, Zbigniew Darzynkiewicz, a Polishborn American scientist, has very strong ties to Poland. In 1968, he escaped a communist regime and became a role model from foreign lands for a new democratic Poland. Still Polish scientists come regularly to his laboratory in Hawthorne, New York to learn science. The first democratic President of Poland, Lech Walesa, awarded him a gold medal for scientific achievements. He was also awarded the Polish Millennium Gold Award in recognition of research accomplishments which was also bestowed on other luminaries of Polish heritage, including Andrew Schally, Ludwik Gross, Hilary Koprowski and Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was also elected as a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Krakow), and just recently, Polish film-makers have produced a movie "Anatomy of Success" that describes some of his achievements. Dr. Darzynkiewicz has an enormous bibliography. In the current total, he has authored over 450 original publications and over 100 chapters and reviews in books devoted to the subjects of cell growth, regulation of the cell cycle and apoptosis, and has either authored or edited numerous books. His publications have been cited over 20,000 times in the scientific literature. And yet, he still works seven days a week. At 9 a.m., even on Saturdays and Sundays, he is in his laboratory at Brander Cancer Research Institute. While a high school student, Dr. Darzynkiewicz was fascinated by quantum physics and by cosmology. He was planning to become a physicist. Yet, in communist Poland it was impossible to pursue this dream, so he entered, as if by default, a Medical School. Physics lost, but cell biology won. In his rare spare hours, he still reads books on general relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology. Not surprisingly, he has introduced many physics-oriented ideas and approaches to cell biology.
Anticancer Research
The 20 th of July 2022 marked 200 years since the birth of Gregor Mendel, whose experimentation in the field of heredity laid the groundwork for modern genetics, consequently paving the way for gene therapy. Over the past bicentennial, the field of genetics has evolved from the study of inheritable traits in pea plants, to the implementation of revolutionary gene therapies with the aim of curing diseases that have plagued humanity since inception, with cancer and hemophilia at the forefront (Figure 1). Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk and teacher, spent nearly a decade studying patterns of inheritance (1). Ultimately settling on pea plants as his subject due to their distinguishable traits, ease of growing, and pace of reproduction, Mendel grew over 10,000 plants in the garden of his monastery over the course of his experiments (2). Implementing both cross-fertilization and self-fertilization methods, Mendel observed multiple generations of plant lineages, documenting seven distinct characteristics, and subsequently calculating the ratios of the two distinct forms of each characteristic. Analysis of this data led to the proposition of three principles of inheritance, which he presented in 1865 at the Natural History Society in Austria (3-5). Unbeknownst to Mendel, these three principles: the law of dominance, the law of segregation, and the law of independent assortment, accurately encompass the mode of inheritance of a multitude of human traits aptly referred to today as "Mendelian traits" (6, 7). Although Mendel is now known as the "Father of Genetics", the term "genetics" was not introduced until 1906, decades after his studies (8, 9). William Bateson, who at the time served as Chair of Biology at Cambridge University, publicly established the term at the Third International Conference on Plant Hybridization during his inaugural address "The Progress of Genetic Research" (8, 10, 11). Three decades later in Poland, the term "genetic engineering" was coined by microbiologist A. Jost during a presentation in 1941 on yeast reproduction (12). Links between DNA and the field of genetics date back to the early 1900s, yet DNA was not identified as the material of heredity until 1944 (13, 14). Within a decade, James Watson and Francis Crick published the basis of our modern understanding of DNA's structure: the double helix (15, 16). The article, published in 1953 in the journal Nature, detailed base pairing rules and the antiparallel nature of the sugarphosphate backbones (15, 16). Watson and Crick's discovery ultimately arose from the x-ray crystallographic evidence collected by Rosalind Franklin, specifically an image taken by her student, PhD candidate Raymond Gossling, known as "Photo 51" (17, 18). Francis Crick continued to make groundbreaking contributions to the field of genetics in the following years. In his laboratory, his team determined that three bases of DNA, now aptly referred to as a "codon", code for a singular amino acid (19, 20). By 1966, the contributions of multiple laboratories including Crick's, ultimately cracked the genetic code; the mRNA code for all 20 amino acids, in addition to both the start and stop codons, had been identified (20-23).
Diter von Wettstein, Professor of Genetics and Master of Translating Science into Applications
Methods in molecular biology, 2020
The present and subsequent chapters in this volume are dedicated to the life and research of Professor Diter von Wettstein who contributed immensely to the development of science and education. His contributions spanned various fields of science such as genetics, physiology, ultrastructural analysis, molecular biology, genomics, and biotechnology including genome editing. He performed and promoted pioneering research in the fields of epigenetics, directed evolution of enzymes, synthetic biology (promoter and gene optimizations), and genomics (genome sequencing of baker's yeast). Glimpses of his time at the Carlsberg Laboratory and Washington State University, with examples from the research performed at these institutions, are included in this chapter. His life is an inspiration to the next generation of biologists. Despite difficult situations, his persistent efforts and keen desire to learn enabled him to overcome obstacles. He always tried to attain the best, excelling in tra...