Michael S. Levine

Michael Levine is an American developmental and cell biologist at Princeton University, where he is the Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and a Professor of Molecular Biology.

Levine previously held appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University. He is notable for co-discovering the Homeobox in 1983 and for discovering the organization of the regulatory regions of developmental genes.

Levine was born in West Hollywood and raised in Los Angeles. Levine studied biology as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, studying biology with Allan Wilson and graduating in 1976. He went on to graduate studies at Yale, where he studied with Alan Garen and in 1981 received a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

Levine joined the Princeton faculty in 2015, and had been a professor at UC Berkeley after leaving UCSD in 1996.

Levine was a post-doc with Walter Gehring in Switzerland from 1982 to 1983. There, he co-discovered the homeobox with Ernst Hafen and fellow post-doc William McGinnis:

After learning that Ultrabithorax, a gene that specifies the development of wings, showed a localized pattern of expression similar to that of Antennapedia, they decided to revisit the classic papers of Ed Lewis. In 1978, Lewis had proposed that all these homeotic genes (the ones that tell animals where to put a wing and where to put a leg and so on) arose from a common ancestral gene. So McGinnis carved up the Antennapedia gene and, using those pieces as probes, the trio identified eight genes, which turned out to be the eight homeotic genes in flies. "That pissed off a lot of people," says Levine. "The homeotic genes were the trophies of the Drosophila genome. And we got 'em all. I mean, we got 'em all!" Far from being humble, Levine says, "We were like, 'We kicked your ass pretty good, didn't we, baby!' Those were the days."