Ronald Plasterk

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Ronald Plasterk

Ronald Hans Anton Plasterk (born April 12, 1957 in The Hague ) was the Dutch Minister for the Interior and Overseas Territories in the Rutte II cabinet from November 5, 2012 to October 26, 2017 . From February 22, 2007 to February 23, 2010 he was the Dutch Minister for Education, Culture and Science . Plasterk is a member of the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA), is a molecular biologist, entrepreneur and has written various newspaper columns .

Life

After his graduation Ronald Plasterk studied at the University of Amsterdam economics but moved to the undergraduate to study biology at the University of Leiden . In this discipline he put his degree in 1981, and his doctorate then in Leiden with his work "inversion of the G segment of bacteriophage Mu, analysis of a genetic switch". He then worked as a post-doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology and at the Molecular Biology Laboratory of the British MRC in Cambridge , where he researched the model organism C. elegans with the later Nobel Prize winner John E. Sulston .

From 1987 to 2000 he was group leader of the Dutch Cancer Research Institute at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital . At the same time he was first endowed professor for molecular biology at the Free University of Amsterdam from 1993 to 1997 and then he was appointed professor for molecular genetics at the University of Amsterdam. In 2000 he was appointed director of the Hubrecht Laboratory at the Netherlands Institute for Developmental Biology (KNAW) in Utrecht .

Willem Breuker accompanies a musical lecture by Ronald Plasterk with a fire extinguisher at the party conference of the PvdA 2009

In 1999 he received the highest Dutch science award , the Spinoza Prize . He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).

From October 11, 1982 Ronald Plasterk was a member of the PvdA City Council in Leiden for two years until September 1, 1984 . In 1995 he began writing columns for the Intermediair magazine and from 1999 for the de Volkskrant daily newspaper .

A false statement made by Plasterk on October 30, 2013 in the course of the NSA affair about the scope of the secret service operations of the Dutch secret services led to a vote of no confidence, which he just passed.

At the beginning of July 2016 he had to undergo a heart operation.

Since January 2019 he has been CEO of an Amsterdam company for cancer therapies ("Frame Therapeutics"), which he founded with two other business partners in December 2018.

plant

His dissertation dealt with the recombination of bacteriophages , where he discovered an active enzyme. At Caltech, he discovered that a bacterium (the Borrelia hermsii parasite ) that evaded the immune system by constantly changing its surface antigens had linear plasmids instead of the usual circular ones , which enabled the genetic material to be rearranged (recombined) more quickly.

As a group leader at the Dutch Cancer Research Center, he and his group systematically investigated transposition in the genome of C. elegans , one of the standard model animals in biology, and thus created a mutation map that shows the function of the individual genes (the nematode has 19,000 genes in total).

He also studied the enzymes responsible for the incorporation of the genetic material of the AIDS virus into the host genome (HIV integrase ) and studied their structure (the enzyme offers starting points for drugs against AIDS in the form of integrase inhibitors ). In addition to the genetic analysis of the transposition, he also dealt with the biochemistry of the enzymes involved.

religion

Plasterk was socialized as a Roman Catholic and attended the high school of the Paters van het Heilig Hart van Jezus in The Hague, today's Sint Jans College .

However, he later became a staunch atheist. He says that at the age of 13 he came to believe that God does not exist but that he does not seek definitive atheism . In 1997, in his column in the weekly Intermediair , Plasterk used his term " Ietsism " for the first time , neologism he created from Dutch. "iets" = "something" . He used it to describe the belief he made out of those who neither clearly believe in the God of a revelation nor renounce the belief, but believe in something , a higher power or something similar in his opinion TV program Buitenhof mentioned, the term gained greater popularity among the Dutch public. At first he expressed himself sharply disapproving of the attitude he had stipulated that it was a poor and annoying phenomenon of the times, but later expressed himself in a column for Buitenhof much more conciliatory:

" Ietsism is a diffuse belief, almost a kind of atheism with a touch of nostalgia, intellectually meager, but much more sympathetic than the idea of ​​an evil God who tolerates this misery."

- Ronald Plasterk

Plasterk is a staunch opponent of creationism and intelligent design . In 2005 the then Education Minister Maria van der Hoeven publicly expressed her interest in intelligent design and announced on her personal weblog that she wanted to initiate a parliamentary debate on whether intelligent design could not be taught in schools. He pointed out that the curricula of public schools should not have any content that was not adequately scientifically proven.

At the time of the Balkenende IV cabinet , he said that he had no problems working with Christian-minded ministerial colleagues.

Fonts (selection)

  • RF Ketting, SEJ Fischer, E. Bernstein, T. Sijen, GJ Hannon, RHA Plasterk: Dicer functions in RNA interference and in synthesis of small RNA involved in developmental timing in C. elegans. In: Genes & Development. Volume 15, 2001, pp. 2654-2659.
  • T. Sijen, J. Fleenor, F. Simmer, KL Thijssen, S. Parrish, L. Timmons, RHA Plasterk, A. Fire: On the role of RNA amplification in dsRNA-triggered gene silencing. In: Cell. Volume 107, 2001, pp. 465-476.
  • M. Tijsterman, RF Ketting, KL Okihara, T. Sijen, RHA Plasterk: Short antisense RNAs can trigger gene silencing in C. elegans, depending on the RNA helicase MUT-14. In: Science. Volume 295, 2002, pp. 694-697.
  • E. Wienholds, S. Schulte-Merker, B. Walderich, RHA Plasterk: Target-selected inactivation of the zebrafish rag1 gene. In: Science. Volume 297, 2002, pp. 99-102.
  • E. Wienholds, MJ Koudijs, FJM Van Eeden, E. Cuppen, RHA Plasterk: The microRNA-producing enzyme Dicer 1 is essential for zebrafish development. In: Nature Genetics. Volume 35, 2003, pp. 217-218.
  • T. Sijen, RHA Plasterk: Transposon silencing in the Caenorhabditis elegans germ line by natural RNAi. Nature 426: 310-314.
  • E. Berezikov, V. Guryev, J. van de Belt, E. Wienholds, RHA Plasterk, E. Cuppen: Phylogenetic shadowing and computational identification of human microRNA genes. In: Cell. Volume 120, 2005, pp. 21-24. PMID 15652478
  • VJP Robert, T. Sijen, J. van Wolfswinkel, RHA Plasterk: Chromatin and RNAi factors protect the C. elegans germline against repetitive sequences. In: Genes Dev. Volume 19, 2005, pp. 782-787.
  • T. Sijen, FA Steiner, KL Thijssen, RHA Plasterk: Secondary siRNAs result from unprimed RNA synthesis and form a distinct class. In: Science. Volume 315, 2007, pp. 244-247.

Popular science:

  • Wormen en waarden, 1993 (inaugural lecture University of Amsterdam)
  • Techniek van het leven: de betekenis van biotechnologie voor mens en samenleving, ING Medilab, Utrecht 2000
  • Leven uit het lab , Amsterdam: Prometheus 2002 (collection of his columns)
  • Wetenschap en politiek , Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen, Haarlem, 2010

Web links

Commons : Ronald Plasterk  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Government announcements on the no-confidence vote against Ronald Plasterk
  2. ↑ Electrospaces.net: Dutch government tried to hide the truth about metadata collection , on Electrospaces.net (blog) from February 17, 2014 (English).
  3. ↑ Information on the Frame Therapeutics company website
  4. ^ "He is geen verband tussen altruïsme en God". In: De Groene Amsterdammer . December 22, 2001, accessed March 26, 2019 (Dutch, interview with Plasterk).
  5. ↑ Ronald Plasterk: ietsisme, Genootschap Onze Taal, 2007-02-14 ( Dutch ) Archived from the original on August 12, 2007.
  6. ↑ Ronald Plasterk: Column: Kerk en Staat ( Memento of May 26, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), VPRO , May 8, 2005, (Dutch).
  7. ↑ Ronald Plasterk / Uitvinder 'ietsisme' op Onderwijs , Trouw , February 14, 2007, (Dutch).
  8. ↑ Met de Bijbel bruggen slaan naar het CDA , De Pers , December 8, 2008 (Dutch).
personal data
SURNAME Plasterk, Ronald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Plasterk, Ronald Hans Anton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch microbiologist and politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH The hague