Dr Alan Wolffe obtained his PhD in 1984 from the Medical Research Council in the UK and carried out postdoctoral training at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore. In 1987, he joined the NIH as a faculty member and in 1990 became a Department head in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. At NIH, Dr Wolffe's laboratory made many fundamental contributions to our understanding of chromatin structure and function, including the role of histones as architectural factors in the activation and repression of specific genes, the discovery that histone acetylation facilitates transcription factor access to nucleosomal DNA and the biochemical connection between DNA methylation and histone deacetylases. In 2000, Dr Wolffe became Chief Scientific Officer of Sangamo BioSciences Inc, a biotechnology company that makes use of our contemporary understanding of chromatin structure and function to discover new drugs and their targets.

figure 1

Figure 1