Boris Ephrussi
Boris Ephrussi ( Russian Борис Самойлович Эфрусси ; born May 9, 1901 in Moscow , † May 2, 1979 in Paris ) was a French geneticist of Russian descent .
life and work
Ephrussi emigrated from Russia to France after the October Revolution . He graduated from the Sorbonne in 1922 in zoology and received his doctorate in experimental embryology in 1932. At that time he was concerned with the influence of external stimuli on the development of fertilized sea urchin eggs and with cell cultures. In 1934 he went to Caltech with Thomas Hunt Morgan on a Rockefeller Fellowship . There they collaborated with George Beadle on the genetic control of eye coloring in Drosophila, using micropipettes and micromanipulators to transplant parts of organs and tissues from Drosophila larvae. The collaboration was continued when Beadle stayed in Paris in 1935 and Ephrussi at Caltech in 1936 and was the beginning of the one-gene-one-enzyme thesis for which Beadle and Tatum received the Nobel Prize.
During World War II, Ephrussi (who was Jewish) was a refugee at Johns Hopkins University . He then returned to France, where he did research at the "Institut de Biologie Physicochimique" (IBPC, Rothschild Institute) in Paris and then at the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette. He turned in particular to genetic research on wheat cells and genetics outside the cell nucleus (in the mitochondria ), which was continued by his student Piotr Slonimski and his school. In 1966 he and Mary Weiss succeeded in creating hybrids of somatic cells from different species. For Ephrussi, this was just an advancement of techniques used to study the differentiation of cells in embryonic development, but the techniques soon found wide use in mammalian genetics.
Jacques Monod is one of his students .
Awards
- 1958: Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 1961: Member of the National Academy of Sciences
- 1968: CNRS gold medal
- 1970: Member of the American Philosophical Society
- 1971: Prix Charles-Léopold Mayer
- 1973: Rosenstiel Award
- 1974: Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
- 1976: Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize
- 1979: Member of the Académie des Sciences
literature
- Roman Herschel: Boris Ephrussi. In: Annual Review of Genetics . Volume 14, 1980, pp. 447-450, doi : 10.1146 / annurev.ge.14.120180.002311 , (obituary).
- Doris T. Zullen, Richard M. Burian: On the beginning of somatic cell hybridization: Boris Ephrussi and chromosome transplantation. In: Genetics. Volume 132, Number 1, 1992, pp. 1-8, PMC 1205109 (free full text); also in James F. Crow, William F. Dove (Editors): Perspectives on Genetics. Anecdotal, historical and critical commentaries, 1987-1998. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI et al. 2000, ISBN 0-299-16604-X , pp. 302-309.
- Richard M. Burian, Jean Gayon: Génétique et recherche médicale en France: le cas de Boris Ephrussi (1901–1979). In: Sciences Sociales et Santé. Volume 10, Number 4, 1992, pp. 25-45, ( digitized version ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Developed by Robert Chambers, who instructed a friend of Ephrussi in Paris and whose technique Ephrussi already used in his dissertation. See Zullen, Burian in the Bibliography.
- ↑ Member History: Boris Ephrussi. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 1, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ephrussi, Boris |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Эфрусси, Борис Самойлович (Russian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French geneticist of Russian descent |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 9, 1901 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Moscow , Russian Empire |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 2nd 1979 |
| Place of death | Paris |