Roy John Britten

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Roy John Britten (born October 1, 1919 in Washington, DC , † January 21, 2012 in Costa Mesa , California ) was an American physicist and molecular biologist . He is considered to be the discoverer of the repetitive DNA elements in the genome of eukaryotes . From 1971 to 1999 he worked at the California Institute of Technology .

Life

Roy Britten was the son of Rollo Britten, a statistician with the Public Health Service , and Marion Hale Britten, who worked in the Department of Anthropology and Psychology at the National Academy of Sciences . He grew up in McLean, Virginia , a hamlet not far from Washington, DC that was only founded in 1910. As a student, Britten attended boarding school, then majored in physics at the University of Virginia from 1936 ; In 1940 he passed the bachelor's degree and in 1941 at Johns Hopkins University for a master's degree . His plans to do a PhD in physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore came to nothing when the United States entered World War II . Instead, he worked for the National Bureau of Standards as part of the Manhattan Project to a process for the separation of uranium - isotopes , "of which he always said that fortunately completely failed". He was only able to continue his studies from 1946 after the war ended; In 1951 he earned a doctorate in physics from Princeton University . In the same year he became a member of the biophysics group in the Department of Geomagnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington , where he remained employed until 1971. From 1971 until his retirement in 1999 he did research for the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), his research group was based at the Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory .

Research topics

After Roy Britten for his doctoral thesis in physics a. a. After researching the separation of potassium isotopes, his move to the Carnegie Institution in 1951 was soon followed by a change in his research focus from nuclear physics to biophysics. The background to this was that an intensive search for the carrier of the genetic information had been carried out since the early 1940s and the fine structure of DNA was published in 1953 by the American James Watson and the British Francis Crick on the basis of DNA X-rays . The biophysics group to which Britten belonged, for example, helped establish the bacterium Escherichia coli as a model organism for studying protein synthesis and DNA replication . From this, in the 1960s, Britten developed a method of describing the sequence of base pairs in plants and animals , which in 1968 led to the detection of repetitive DNA elements.

Even after moving to the California Institute of Technology - and there in cooperation with developmental biologist Eric H. Davidson - the classification of repetitive DNA elements remained Britten's research focus, as well as the search for their function and their emergence in the course of tribal history , especially for clues had been found that their structure sometimes resembles that of retroviruses .

Honors

Roy Britten had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1972, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1986 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1987 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roy J. Britten and David E. Kohne: Repeated Sequences in DNA. In: Science . Volume 161, No. 3841, 1968, pp. 529-540, doi: 10.1126 / science.161.3841.529 .
  2. ^ A b Eric H. Davidson: Roy J. Britten (1919–2012). In: Science . Volume 335, No. 6073, 2012, p. 1183, doi: 10.1126 / science.1220828 .
  3. ^ Roy John Britten (1919-2012). Biography on the Arizona State University server .
  4. ↑ Short biography on the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory server .
  5. ^ R. Andrew Cameron: On DNA Hybridiziation and Modern Genomics. In: Molecular Reproduction & Development. Volume 79, No. 4, 2012, pp. Fm i – Fm iii, doi: 10.1002 / mrd. 22034 , full text (PDF) .
  6. ↑ James D. Watson and Francis Crick : Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. In: Nature . Volume 171, No. 4356, 1953, pp. 737-738, doi: 10.1038 / 171737a0 , full text (PDF) .
personal data
SURNAME Britten, Roy John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Britten, Roy J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American molecular biologist, discoverer of the repetitive elements of DNA in the genome of eukaryotes
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington, DC
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 2012
Place of death Costa Mesa , California