Gerald Mayer Rubin (born 1950) is an American biologist, notable for pioneering the use of transposable P elements in genetics, and for leading the public project to sequence the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Related to his genomics work, Rubin's lab is notable for development of genetic and genomics tools and studies of signal transduction and gene regulation. Rubin also served as a vice president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2003–2020) and founding executive director of its Janelia Research Campus.http://www.sciencewatch.com/sept-oct99/sw_sept-oct99_page3.htm HMI's Gerald M. Rubin: The Benefits of Genomics, ScienceWatch, v.10, n.5 (Sept./Oct. 1999)
Education and early life Rubin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1950, attending the Boston Latin School. Rubin completed his undergraduate degree in biology at MIT, working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory during the summer.UPI, "Gerald Rubin: Science Far Too Conservative", April 20, 2006 (discussing Janelia Farm). He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, working at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1974, for studies on 5.8S ribosomal RNA supervised by Sydney Brenner.
Career and research
Following his PhD, Rubin did postdoctoral research at Stanford University with David Hogness.
Rubin's first faculty position was at Harvard Medical School, followed by the Carnegie Institution of Washington; in 1983 he accepted an appointment as the John D. MacArthur Professor of Genetics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator in 1987. He is currently the MacArthur Professor of Genetics emeritus, Genomics and Development, in Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, and a Senior Group Leader at the Janelia Research Campus.
As the director of the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, he led the public effort to sequence Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly). As Vice President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Rubin led the development of HHMI's Janelia Research Campus, an independent biomedical research institute in Virginia. While at Janelia Research Campus, he led the effort to complete the first Drosophila connectome.
His lab is particularly known for its development of genomics tools, studies of gene regulation and other genome-wide research, neuroanatomy, and neurogenetics.
He was one of the three scientific founders of Exelixis in 1994; the company's original business plan was to exploit genomic research in Drosophila and other model organism to discover biological targets that could be used in drug discovery.
Further reading Below is a partial list from numerous scientific research project papers, many of which were led by Rubin:
"Generation and initial analysis of more than 15,000 full-length human and mouse cDNA sequences"; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; 2002
"Analysis of genetic mosaics in developing and adult Drosophila tissues"; Development; 1993
"The Gene Ontology (GO) database and informatics resource"; Nucleic Acids Research; 2004
"Transposition of cloned P elements into Drosophila germ line chromosomes"; Science; 1982 "Genetic transformation of Drosophila with transposable element vectors"; Science; 1982
"The role of the genome project in determining gene function: Insights from model organisms"; Cell; 1996
"The genome sequence of Drosophila melanogaster"; Science; 2000
"Comparative genomics of the eukaryotes"Science; 2000
"Gene ontology: Tool for the unification of biology. The Gene Ontology Consortium"; Nature Genetics; 2000
"The draft sequences: Comparing species"; Nature; 2001
"Evidence for large domains of similarly expressed genes in the Drosophila genome"; Journal of Biology; 2002
Awards and honours Rubin has won numerous awards including:
1971 - Phi Beta Kappa 1971 – Phi Lambda Epsilon 1971–1973 – United States Churchill Foundation Fellow 1971–1974 – National Science Foundation (NSF), predoctoral Fellow 1974–1976 – Helen Hay Whitney Fellow 1983 – AAAS-Newcomb Cleveland Prize (with Allan C. Spradling for their papers describing germ-line transformation of Drosophila) 1983 – Co-winner, Passano Foundation Young Scientist Award 1985 – American Chemical Society Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry 1985 – Co-winner, National Academy of Sciences U.S. Steel Foundation Award in Molecular Biology 1986 – Genetics Society of America Medal 1987 – Member of the National Academy of Sciences USA 1992 – Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 1992 – Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1992 – Fellow, American Academy of Microbiology 1993 – Howard Taylor Ricketts Award from The University of Chicago 2000 – AAAS-Newcomb Cleveland Prize, AAAS (with Craig Venter, Mark Adams, and Susan Celniker) for his March 24, 2000, review paper on sequencing the Drosophila genomeRobert Sanders, "UC Berkeley's Gerald Rubin shares AAAS prize with Celera's Craig Venter for sequencing genome of the fruit fly", UC Berkeley Campus News, Feb. 20, 2001. 2002 – Member, Institute of Medicine 2003 – George W. Beadle Medal (with Allan C. Spradling) 2006 – R&D Magazine Scientist of the Year 2006 2007 – Foreign Member, Royal Society (UK) 2017 – Member, European Molecular Biology Organization 2024 – Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (with Cornelia Bargmann)Gruber Prize in Neuroscience 2024 2026 – Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences.Wiley Prize 2026
References