Stanley Falkow
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Stanley Falkow FRS |
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| Born | 1934 Albany, New York |
| Alma mater | University of Maine |
| Occupation | microbiologist and professor |
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| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | An episomic element in a strain of Salmonella typhosa (1960) |
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Website med |
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Stanley Falkow, PhD, (born 1934 in Albany, New York) is microbiologist and a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is sometimes referred to as the father of molecular microbial pathogenesis, which is the study of how infectious microbes and host cells interact to cause disease at the molecular level. He formulated molecular Koch's postulates, which have guided the study of the microbial determinants of infectious diseases since the late 1980s.
Falkow received his B.S. degree from the University of Maine, graduating cum laude, and went on to earn his Ph.D. from Brown University. Following the completion of his graduate studies, Dr. Falkow went on to become a staff member at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in the Department of Bacterial Immunology where he was eventually named the assistant chief of the department. Dr. Falkow's early work in the 1960s focused on the genetic mechanisms that enable populations of bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. He demonstrated that organisms, such as shigella, can possess gene fragments called plasmids that exist apart from the bacterial chromosome and that they carry specialized information for survival. Under selective pressure from antibiotics, one species of bacteria can pass its plasmids to another unidirectionally rather than by mating, thereby preserving its own specialized survival genes.
In 1966, he joined Georgetown University School of Medicine as a professor of microbiology. He later moved to Seattle to become a member of the faculty of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Here he described how meningitis and gonorrhea organisms acquire plasmids to become resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics.
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