Grete Kellenberger-Gujer
| Grete Kellenberger-Gujer | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
November 12, 1919 Rümlang, Zürich, Switzerland |
| Died | March 13, 2011 (aged 91) Bülach, Switzerland |
| Residence | Geneva, Switzerland |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Notable awards | Nessim-Habif Prize, 1979 |
Grete Kellenberger-Gujer (1919-2011) was a Swiss molecular biologist known for her discoveries on genetic recombination and restriction modification system of DNA. She was a pioneer in the genetic analysis of bacteriophages and contributed to the early development of molecular biology.
After earning her matura in classics at the Töchterschule in Zürich, Grete Gujer studied chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. There, she met Eduard Kellenberger, a physics student. The couple married in 1945. In 1946 they moved to Geneva, where Eduard Kellenberger began his doctoral work thesis under the supervision of Jean Weigle, professor of physics at the University of Geneva. Grete Kellenberger contributed to the development of new methods to prepare and analyse biological samples using an electron microscope, a new technique at the time. After Jean Weigle left for the California Institute of Technology in 1948, Grete Kellenberger took on an increasingly important role in the study of lambda phage and its mutations at the University of Geneva. Her collaboration with Jean Weigle, who returned to Geneva every summer, is demonstrated their by regular correspondence archived at Caltech and by numerous publications.
It was Grete Kellenberger who gave Werner Arber, who carried out his PhD between 1954 and 1958, the conceptual basis and practices for his future studies in the genetics of bacteriophages. Grete Kellenberger published several articles with Arber between 1957 and 1966.
Grete Kellenberger's major scientific contribution was the discovery that recombination is due to a physical exchange of DNA, and not to selective replication. An article on this subject authored by Grete Kellenberger, Maria Ludovica Zichichi, and Jean Weigle was published in the same issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) as the article from Meselson and Weigle on the topic. However, although the data for Grete's article were obtained using a more original approach and were ready months before experiments were concluded in Meselson's laboratory, Grete's article appeared after Meselson's.
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