Matthew Meselson

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Matthew Stanley Meselson (born May 24, 1930 in Denver , Colorado ) is an American geneticist , molecular biologist and chemist .

Life

Meselson studied chemistry at the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in 1951 and graduated from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). He received his doctorate there in 1957 under Linus Pauling with the thesis I. Equilibrium sedimentation of macromolecules in density gradients with application to the study of deoxyribonucleic acid. II. The crystal structure of N, N-dimethyl malonamide . In 1958 he became an assistant professor at Caltech and in 1960 an associate professor at Harvard University , where he received a full professorship and from 1976 Thomas Dudley Cabot was Professor of Natural Sciences.

In 1954 he got a job at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole , Massachusetts . It was there that he began working with Franklin Stahl . The two later developed a method with which it could be demonstrated that the replication of deoxyribonucleic acid is semiconservative (= half-conserving). This experiment is known as the Meselson-Stahl experiment . In 1961 he was involved with François Jacob and Sydney Brenner in the experimental discovery of messenger RNA , which confirmed a hypothesis by Jacques Monod and Jacob. In collaboration with the later Nobel Prize winner Paul Modrich, he investigated natural DNA repair (DNA mismatch repair, repair on a strand and role of methylation) and the way cells destroy foreign DNA. Independently of Werner Arber , at the end of the 1960s he discovered the mode of action of the restriction enzymes first discovered in bacteriophages by Salvador Luria and others in the 1950s , which then played a fundamental role in the development of genetic engineering in the 1970s.

From 1963 he also dealt with chemical and biological weapons and their control and restriction and advised several US governments in this area (adviser to the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1963 to 1973).

In 1962, Meselson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences , on whose council he served from 1984 to 1987, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society . Since 1981 he has been a member of the American Philosophical Society . He received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 1963 , the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal in 1995, and the Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award in 2004. In 1984 he was a MacArthur Fellow . He has honorary degrees from Yale, Princeton, Oakland University, and the University of Chicago. In 1978 he received the Leo Szilard Award , in 1964 the Eli Lilly Award and he received the Lehman Award and Presidential Award from the New York Academy of Sciences.

Works

  • Chemicals and Cancer . University Press, Boulder, Col. 1979

literature

  • Frederic L. Holmes: Meselson, Stahl and the replication of DNA . Yale, New Haven, Conn. 2001, ISBN 0-300-08540-0

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The biographical data, publications and academic pedigree of Matthew S. Meselson at academictree.org, accessed on January 2, 2019.
  2. ↑ Meselson, Stahl, The Replication of DNA in Escherichia coli, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 44, 1958, pp. 671-682
  3. ↑ Brenner, Jacob, Meselson, An unstable intermediate carrying information from genes to ribosomes for protein synthesis, Nature, Volume 190, 1961, pp. 576-81
  4. ↑ Nobel Prize recognition for Modrich and colleagues 2015, pdf
  5. ^ R. Wagner, M. Meselson, Repair tracts in mismatched DNA heteroduplexes, Proc. Nat. Acad. Volume 73, 1976, pp. 4135-4139
  6. ↑ PJ Pukkila, J. Peterson, G. Herman, P. Modrich, M. Meselson: Effects of high levels of DNA adenine methylation on methyl-directed mismatch repair in Escherichia coli. In: Genetics. Volume 104, Number 4, August 1983, pp. 571-582, PMID 6225697 , PMC 1202127 (free full text).
  7. ↑ M. Meselson, R. Yuan DNA restriction enzyme from E. coli , Nature, Volume 217, 1968, pp. 1110-4
  8. ^ Member History: Matthew S. Meselson. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 25, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Meselson, Matthew
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meselson, Matthew Stanley (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Denver