1980s – Gene Cloning

The first new faculty members to start in the 1980s were John Hopfield, appointed as full professor of Biology and Chemistry, and Elliot Meyerowitz, appointed assistant professor of Biology. In 1981 Mary Kennedy and Barbara Wold became assistant professors, followed by Ellen Rothenberg in 1982, and in the same year John Abelson and Mel Simon came as full professors. In 1983 the assistant professors’ ranks were incremented by Mark Tanouye and Scott Emr, and Paul Patterson joined as a full professor; in 1984 James Bower and in 1985 David Anderson became assistant professors. Judy Campbell also joined the Biology Division in 1985 as Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biology; prior to this (from 1977) she had been a faculty member solely in the Division of Chemistry. In 1986 assistant professors Howard Lipshitz and Christof Koch joined, Koch as Assistant Professor of Computation and Neural Systems, a new interdisciplinary area started by, among others, Hopfield. Paul Sternberg arrived in 1987 as Assistant Professor of Biology, as did Pamela Bjorkman, William Dunphy and Kai Zinn in 1989. All told 19 new appointments were made to the Biology professorial faculty in the decade – a record for the Division that is still unbroken.

Of course the new additions were partly balanced by departures – there were the retirements of Bonner (1981), Horowitz (1982), Owen (1983), Mitchell and Sperry (1984), Fender (1986) and Lewis (1988); and in addition Maniatis, Strumwasser, Berg, Hudspeth, Pettigrew, Brockes and Konopka departed. This still left room for an increase in the faculty by 5, to a total of 33.

The chairmanship changed hands twice in the decade; in 1980, with the appointment of Lee Hood as chair, and again in 1989, when Hood stepped down and John Abelson became Division Chair. Among the highlights of the decade was the award of the Nobel Prize to Roger Sperry in 1981. The building program also continued in the ‘80s, with the construction of the Braun Laboratories (1982) and of the Beckman Institute (1989), each of which contain a mix of labs from different Divisions – Braun being shared between Chemistry and Biology, and the Beckman Institute housing not only the semiautonomous Institute but also laboratories from Biology, Chemistry and Geology.

One of the research themes of the 1980s was the advent and wide utilization of gene cloning, and gene sequencing. Maniatis came as one of the pioneers of these new technologies, as did Simon and Abelson, and Meyerowitz, Wold, Lipshitz and Zinn as new faculty members trained in them. Hood in particular among the faculty switched his laboratory to exploit the new possibilities of genomics, and one result of this was the invention in the Hood lab of the automated DNA sequencer, which played a central role in the genome projects of the 1990s and beyond.