1990s – Genomics, Proteomics, and Macromolecular Machines

The 1990s continued the hiring of new faculty that characterized the previous decade. In 1990 Gilles Laurent was hired as Assistant Professor of Biology and of Computation and Neural Systems, followed by appointment of Scott Fraser and Alexander Varshavsky as full professors (1991 and 1992, respectively), Stephen Mayo as assistant professor in 1992, Raymond Deshaies and Erin Schuman as assistant professors and Richard Andersen as full professor in 1993, Marianne Bronner-Fraser as full professor and Bruce Hay as assistant professor in 1996, and Shin Shimojo as associate professor in 1997. 1997 also saw the arrival of David Baltimore as President and Professor of Biology, the first time a biologist had been president of the Institute. Assistant Professor Jose Alberola-Ila joined in 1998.

The decade also saw the departures of Mark Tanouye, Elias Lazarides, Lee Hood, Scott Emr, David Van Essen, and Howard Lipshitz, the retirement and departure of John Hopfield, and the formal (but not actual!) retirement of Seymour Benzer. John Abelson completed his term as chair in 1995, to be replaced by Mel Simon.

The long tradition of using Drosophila genetics to explore fundamental biological questions was recognized by two prestigious prizes awarded this decade. Seymour Benzer received the Crafoord Prize in 1993 for his work examining the genetics of behavior. And Ed Lewis won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his his work in developmental genetics – the fifth Nobel Prize awarded to a member of the Divisional faculty.

One of the new research directions that became evident in the ‘90s was structural biology, with Pamela Bjorkman of Biology and Douglas Rees of the Chemistry Division solving numerous important protein structures by modern methods of x-ray crystallography, and Steven Mayo producing new theoretical methods for understanding protein folding. Genomics also became a core part of the Division, with Caltech contributions to the model organism genome projects such as Paul Sternberg’s work with Caenorhabditis elegans and Elliot Meyerowitz’s work with Arabidopsis thaliana. Mel Simon played a key role in the human genome project – it was his laboratory that invented the BAC clones that made it possible, and that produced the libraries that were sequenced.

The undergraduate program remained highly vigorous in the 1990s. While the large classes of the 1970s were not seen again in the 1980s (the largest class of B.S. graduates in that decade was the class of 1989, with 18), the 1990s surpassed all earlier decades, with total of 223 undergraduate degrees from 1990 through 1999.