James A. Shapiro

James A. Shapiro
Residence	Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Fields	Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Genetics, Biochemistry
Institutions	University of Chicago; Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut Pasteur, France; Harvard Medical School; Brandeis University; Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; Visiting Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, England
Alma mater	Churchill College, Cambridge University, England
Known for	Natural genetic engineering, first isolation of a gene, cooperative behavior in bacteria, pattern formation
Notable awards	Marshall Scholarship (1964-1966), Darwin Prize (University of Edinburgh) 1993, AAAS Fellow 1994, Honorary OBE 2001

James Alan Shapiro is an American biologist, an expert in bacterial genetics and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago.

Shapiro obtained his Bachelor's degree in English from Harvard College in 1964. Then, inspired by a genetics course he had taken as a senior, he shifted from English to science, earned a doctorate in genetics from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1968, and did postdoctoral research with Jon Beckwith at the Harvard Medical School. He was troubled by the potential genetic engineering applications of his research. He spent two years teaching genetics in Havana, Cuba, before returning to another postdoctorate with Harlyn Halvorson at Brandeis University. Since 1973, he has worked as a professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago, and has also been a visiting professor from time to time, including once as a Darwin Prize Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh in 1994.

While working with Beckwith at Harvard, Shapiro was part of the first team to isolate a single gene from an organism. The gene they isolated was lacZ, which codes for the β-galactosidase enzyme used by E. coli bacteria to digest the sugars in milk. Their technique involved transduction of two complementary copies of the gene into two different bacteriophages, then mixing the genetic material from the two phages, and finally using a nuclease to degrade the single-stranded phage genome, leaving only the double-stranded DNA formed by the two copies.

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