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Developmental biology using purified genes

Nature Medicine volume 18, pages 1496–1498 (2012)Cite this article

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Some history

After three years of college I entered the University of Chicago Medical School in the fall of 1952 and discovered biochemistry and research. Lloyd Kozloff, a member of the bacteriophage group in the Department of Biochemistry, guided my research. While in medical school I began searching for a future research subject, thinking it should be an important medically related problem but unexplored by what were then the modern methods of biochemistry.

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Figure 1: Comparison of control (left), anucleolate mutant (center) and magnesium-deficient (right) embryos of X. laevis after four days of development.
Figure 2: An isolated nucleus from a mature oocyte of X. laevis.
Figure 3: Electron micrograph of a partially denatured molecule with repeating units of 5S DNA.
Figure 4: A transcriptional-control region within the 5S rRNA gene.

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Acknowledgements

I owe a great deal to the Carnegie Institution of Washington, now called the Carnegie Institute for Science. It has supported my research for 50 years. I have had generous grants from the US National Institute of General Medical Science since 1975. The G. Harold & Leila Y. Mathers Foundation supported my research in amphibian metamorphosis. Many wonderful graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and other colleagues have contributed to these studies. It is a special pleasure to share the responsibility of running the LSRF with D. Koshland. He and I are responsible for finding sponsors who will support postdoctoral fellows. C. Pratt carries out the day-to-day decisions with the highest efficiency and intelligence. S. DiRenzo, T. Silhavy and J. Broach administer LSRF's peer review process at Princeton University, which this year reached its highest application number ever of 900.

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  1. Donald D. Brown is in the Department of Embryology, Carnegie Institute for Science, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.,

    Donald D Brown

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  1. Donald D Brown
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Correspondence to Donald D Brown.

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Brown, D. Developmental biology using purified genes. Nat Med 18, 1496–1498 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.2929

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