Jean Galiana William A Haseltine Popular Books

Jean Galiana William A Haseltine Biography & Facts

William A. Haseltine (born October 17, 1944) is an American scientist, businessman, author, and philanthropist. He is known for his groundbreaking work on HIV/AIDS and the human genome. Haseltine was a professor at Harvard Medical School, where he founded two research departments on cancer and HIV/AIDS. He is a founder of several biotechnology companies, including Cambridge Biosciences, The Virus Research Institute, ProScript, LeukoSite, Dendreon, Diversa, X-VAX, and Demetrix. He was a founder chairman and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, a company that pioneered the application of genomics to drug discovery. He is president of the Haseltine Foundation for Science and the Arts, and founder, chairman, and president of ACCESS Health International, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving access to high-quality health worldwide. In 2001 he was listed by Time Magazine as one of the world's 25 most influential business people, and in 2015 by Scientific American as one of the 100 most influential leaders in biotechnology. Early life and education Haseltine has devoted his career to improvements in human health. He was born to a scientific family. His grandfather was an engineer, his father a PhD physicist. He was raised at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake in the Mojave Desert of California, surrounded by weapons scientists and engineers. His older sister Florence received both a Ph.D. in biophysics and an MD, and his younger brother Eric a PhD in neurobiology. His younger sister Susan became a specialist in computer systems. Haseltine's early life is described in the book Rapture, by Brian Alexander (1d), and in Gene Masters by Ingrid Winkelgren (3d). Haseltine graduated from Sherman E. Burroughs High School in 1962. In 1966 he received a BA in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1973 a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University. Training in biomedical research As a pre-medical undergraduate student majoring in chemistry, he published two scientific papers, one on the composition of the Martian atmosphere in Science and a second on the use of isotope shifted lasers for communication to outer space in Applied Physics Letters. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year and graduated at the top of his class. Upon graduation he decided to learn as much about science as possible towards creating new ways to treat and cure disease. At Harvard University he worked under the direction of James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and Walter Gilbert, who later received a Nobel prize for developing a method to determine the sequence of DNA. Work in this laboratory gave him an excellent grounding in the tools of what was then the new field of molecular biology. As a graduate student he worked on fundamental aspects of regulation of expression of genes. He elucidated the means by which bacteria signal the shift from growth when food is abundant to maintenance when food is scarce, the topic of his PhD thesis titled Magic Spot and the Stringent Response. During his graduate studies, Haseltine was also active in his opposition to the war in Vietnam. He wrote several articles on the use of technology in the Vietnam War and broke the "Agent Orange Defoliation" story in a cover article in the New Republic. He worked with the American Friends Service Committee to create a resource center for those who wished to understand their own communities’ involvement in the war and lectured against the war throughout the country for several years. He was a founder of "Science for the People". In 1973, Haseltine joined the laboratory of David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a post-doctoral fellow. There he began to work on fundamental aspects of how retroviruses known to cause cancer in animals reproduce. His work, in collaboration with several other scientists, provided unexpected insights into the process of retrovirus replication and was recognized as innovative in publication in leading scientific journals. This work prepared him for research on human disease and retroviruses, both important later in his career. He interrupted his postdoctoral studies at MIT briefly the summer of 1973 to serve as a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, where he continued his work on the regulation of gene expression in bacteria. Cancer research In 1976, he joined the faculty of the new comprehensive cancer center, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He became a professor in the Harvard Medical School Department of Pathology and shortly thereafter a professor in the Cancer Biology Department of the Harvard School of Public Health. He founded the equivalent of two academic departments: the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology devoted to work on cancer cause and treatment, and the Division of Human Retrovirology, dedicated, understanding and finding treatments for HIV/AIDS. As a professor, he published more than two hundred research articles in leading scientific journals and edited several books. He mentored dozens of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have gone on to successful careers of their own at Harvard and elsewhere. He taught advanced level courses in cancer biology and HIV/AIDS to graduate and medical students. For many years he taught a course "Biology and Social Issues" for Harvard non-science undergraduates and was a tutor and thesis advisor for several generations of Harvard undergraduate biochemistry students. Retrovirus replication continued to be a focus of his early research as a Harvard professor. This research led to fundamental insights including the "end to end jumping" of the initial copy of the genome. He then began to focus on two related issues: how retroviruses induce cancer in animals, and whether or not retroviruses cause cancer and other diseases in humans. His laboratory discovered that the key determinant of the ability of retroviruses, those that do not carry oncogenes, to cause cancer is their ability to rapidly replicate in cells that themselves grow rapidly. This allows the retrovirus to implant nearby a cellular oncogene. Another impact for science was his work on the small genetic elements upstream of the transcription start site, now called enhancers, which determine the rate at which genes are copied into RNA. This work provided a key insight into factors that distinguish one cell type from another. While Haseltine claimed to have discovered enhancers, the original discovery was published by Nancy Hopkins' lab in PNAS in July 1983. This was a publication that Haseltine was aware of due to his prior work in David Baltimore's lab, who had for many years resented Hopkins' success in the same area of research as him due to her being a woman. In 1978, responding to the needs of physicians treating cancer, Haseltine began to focus on improving chemotherapy by deepening .... Discover the Jean Galiana William A Haseltine popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jean Galiana William A Haseltine books.