Richard A. Young
| Richard Young | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Richard Allen Young March 12, 1954 Pittsburgh |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
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| Awards |
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| Website | wi |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields |
Genetics Genomics Molecular Biology |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Regulatory Signals in Ribosomal RNA Operons of Escherichia Coli (1979) |
| Notable students | Bing Ren (post-doc), Julia Zeitlinger(post-doc), Richard Jenner(post-doc), Alex Marson(PhD Student), Duncan Odom (postdoc) |
Richard Allen Young (born March 12, 1954) is an American geneticist, a Member of Whitehead Institute, and a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a pioneer in the systems biology of gene control who has developed genomics technologies and concepts key to understanding gene control in human health and disease. He has served as an advisor to the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, and numerous scientific societies and journals. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Scientific American has recognized him as one of the top 50 leaders in science, technology and business.
Young was educated at Indiana University (Bachelor of Science) and Yale University (PhD, 1979).
Young has made major contributions to the understanding of gene control in human development and disease. He discovered that a small set of human embryonic stem cell master transcription factors form a core regulatory circuitry that controls the gene expression program of these cells. This concept of core regulatory circuitry helps guide current efforts to understand gene control, to develop reprogramming protocols for other human cell types and to understand how gene dysregulation contributes to disease.
Young has introduced the concept of transcriptional amplification and described how much of the gene control program in cancer cells is amplified by oncogenic transcription factors such as c-MYC. According to Young, most genes experience transcription initiation, but it is the control of transcription elongation that plays key roles in cell control in health and disease.
Young discovered that large clusters of gene control elements, called super-enhancers, regulate genes that play prominent roles in cell identity. Furthermore, Young showed that disease-associated human genome variation occurs frequently in these super-enhancers and that cancer cell super-enhancers are especially vulnerable to certain transcriptional drugs.
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Wikipedia