Boris Ephrussi

Boris Ephrussi (Russian: Борис Самойлович Эфрусси; 9 May 1901 – 2 May 1979), Professor of Genetics at the University of Paris, was a Russo-French geneticist.

Boris was born on 9 May 1901 into a Jewish family. His father, Samuil Osipovich Ephrussi, was a chemical engineer; his grandfather, Joseph Ephrusi (Efrusi), was the founder of a banking dynasty in Kishinev. He published two papers in November 1966 which represented a key step in a decade of research in his laboratory. This research helped transform mammalian, and especially human, genetics.

Boris started his scientific training as a Russian émigré in 1920. He studied the initiation and regulation of embryological processes by intracellular and extracellular factors. A major strand of his early research concerned the effect of temperature on the development of fertilized sea urchin eggs. In this work he used a micromanipulator, which was developed by Robert Chambers, an American biologist.

During Ephrussi's time, writing a second dissertation was standard practice in France. Ephrussi's involved culturing tissues. Ephrussi ran into difficulties typically associated with early tissue culture techniques, but despite these obstacles Ephrussi managed to conclude from studies of brachyury in mice that intrinsic factors (i.e. genes) play a key role in development.

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