Roy John Britten
| Roy John Britten | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1 October 1919 Washington, D.C. |
| Died |
21 January 2012 (aged 92) Costa Mesa, California |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | US |
| Fields | Molecular Biology |
| Alma mater |
Upper Canada College University of Virginia (B.S. Physics) Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D. Physics) |
| Known for | Discovery of repeated DNA sequences |
Roy John Britten (1 October 1919 – 21 January 2012) was an American molecular biologist known for his discovery of repeated DNA sequences in the genomes of eukaryotic organisms, and later on the evolution of the genome.
Roy Britten was born in Washington, D.C.. He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto, Ontario, and then went to the University of Virginia to study physics. He enrolled at Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student in physics in 1940. At the beginning of World War II, he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. In 1951, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled The Scattering of 32 MeV Protons from Several Elements.
From 1951 to 1971, he was a staff member at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. While there he attended the phage course at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and started working on the processes by which genetic information becomes expressed as proteins. This work was conducted with colleagues Bill H. Hoyer, Brian J. McCarthy, Ellis T. Bolton, Richard B. Roberts, David Kohne, and others. This work led him to want to understand the structure of the chromosome, which was little understood at the time. He developed a new method to explore the sequence structure of DNA using the idea of DNA hybridization. Through this work, he showed that eukaryotic genomes have many repetitive, non-coding DNA sequences, known as repeated sequences. These are now known to be important in the regulation of gene expression in most cells. Shortly thereafter, a theoretical paper with Eric Davidson laid some of the important groundwork for our modern understanding of the regulation of gene expression.
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