Maxine Singer

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Maxine Singer

Maxine Frank Singer (born February 15, 1931 in New York City ) is an American biochemist and molecular biologist.

Life

Singer went to school in Brooklyn and studied chemistry and a minor in biology at Swarthmore College with a bachelor's degree in 1952. In 1957 she received her PhD in biochemistry from Joseph S. Fruton at Yale University . First she dealt with proteins, then, on Fruton's advice, with nucleic acids . From 1956 she was in the biochemistry laboratory of Leon Heppel at the National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington, DC, one of the few places in the USA where she could research nucleic acids at the time . It produced synthetic RNA, which was used in the experiments of the later Nobel Prize winner Marshall Nirenberg for the genetic code ( Poly-U experiment ). She became a Senior Researcher at the NIH and stayed there until 1979. She then went to the National Cancer Institute , where she headed the Biochemistry Laboratory. From 1988 to 2002 she was President of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC

From the beginning of the 1970s she was involved in ethical discussions about genetic engineering ( recombinant DNA ). This was discussed in 1973 at the Gordon Conference on Nucleic Acids, which she co-chaired, and she was instrumental in setting guidelines after the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA in 1975.

In addition to her involvement in the pioneering work to decipher the genetic code, she was involved in the discovery in the 1980s that the Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements (LINEs) in the mammalian genome are transposons .

In 1978 she became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1979 a member of the National Academy of Sciences , 1986 a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and 1990 a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1992 she received the National Medal of Science of the USA, in 1999 the Vannevar Bush Award , in 1982 the AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility and in 2007 the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences.

Web links

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