Today it’s easy to take for granted that geneticists can identify a mutation, find its gene, and map it to the expressed protein. But just a few decades ago, this problem remained a thorny one. Welcome Bender of Harvard Medical School—with his work teasing out the function of the bithorax complex in Drosophila—made key advances in this area. For the development of positional cloning approaches and his creative, in-depth exploration of the function of the bithorax complex, Bender has received the Genetics Society of America’s 2020 Edward Novitski Prize for extraordinary creativity and intellectual ingenuity in solving significant problems in genetics research.

“Welcome Bender opened up the fields of developmental and disease genetics for years to come,” says Mark Peifer of the University of North Carolina, Bender’s former graduate student and one of the scientists who nominated him for the award. “Working in Dave Hogness’s lab, where molecular biology was first applied to Drosophila, Welcome invented a simple but conceptually ingenious idea for positional cloning: Look for a clone in the rough region of the genome and use this as a toehold. Then isolate a larger genomic region overlapping this original clone and use the most distal sequences in that region to iteratively repeat the process.”

Bender’s interest in Drosophila genetics started during his final year as a Harvard undergraduate, which he spent at the MRC Laboratory, working down the hall from Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner. At the time, Crick was excited about fruit flies and the notion of one-band, one-gene, Bender recalls. “When I then began graduate work, I, I imagined that I was going to figure out how to do a transformation into fruit flies.” That idea crashed and burned, he notes. “I was ahead of my time in ideas and behind my time in capabilities.”

Bender completed his PhD at Caltech with Norman Davidson while focusing on RNA tumor viruses, but his interest in Drosophila genetics continued. For his postdoc, he chose to work on recombinant DNA in fruit flies with David Hogness at Stanford. At the time, he says, the biggest challenge was getting access to interesting genes with a history, such as the rosy locus studied by Art Chovnick or the bithorax complex studied by Ed Lewis.

When he started working on positional cloning in the Hogness lab, Bender thought he could divide the Drosophila genome into restriction fragments and separate them with 2-D gel electrophoresis, comparing wild-type fly strains with those that had deletions in an interesting region. “It was a disaster,” Bender says. “At the time we didn’t appreciate that there were so many mobile elements in flies and that every strain had a distinct collection of them.” Plan B involved “walking” along a chromosome with overlapping recombinant clones. (It was a close collaboration with Pierre Spierer, another postdoc.) The walk quickly bumped into a mobile element, which had also inserted into many other places in the genome. This repeat blocked the recovery of a unique overlap. That’s where using different genetic libraries from distinct Drosophila strains—one developed by Elliot Meyerowitz in the Hogness lab and another developed by Joyce Lauer in the Maniatis lab—proved fruitful. The mobile element blockage in one library was absent in the other. Bender also harnessed his knowledge of electron microscopy with nucleic acids, a technique he’d learned in Davidson’s lab. Because they could use heteroduplexing to follow overlaps between two clones, they could unravel tricky genetic problems, including a rearrangement within the bithorax complex that would have been difficult to identify by other methods.

After Bender had launched his own lab at Harvard Medical School, he, Peifer and postdoc François Karch published an influential 1987 review article in Genes & Development outlining the layout and logic of the bithorax complex. “The notion was that the bithorax complex is made up of a series of domains of DNA segments, each of which is responsible for the regulation of a different segment. It’s not that you turn on a gene everywhere in a segment,” he says. Instead each domain is a group of cis regulatory elements that elaborate a pattern in time and space of the small number of transcription factors encoded within the complex. “So the pattern gets richer as you go further back in the animal.” Bender’s lab would then validate this model, initially by characterizing many spontaneous and induced mutations from Ed Lewis’ collection.

Bender’s team and many other labs used the P element to make transgenic flies, and many of these P element insertions landed within the bithorax complex. P elements carrying a reporter gene, like beta galactosidase, were restricted in their expression to particular segments, depending on the position of the insertion within the complex. By following gene expression patterns, they could outline the layout and logic of this complex regulatory network. P elements could also be mobilized by the P transposase, leaving a double stranded break at the insertion site. Bill Engels had shown that such breaks could be used for gene conversion. The Bender lab used that strategy to patch in sequences of interest, a strategy that gave them CRISPR-like gene editing capabilities years before CRISPR was developed. This permitted a series of elegant experiments, many in collaboration with Karch’s group at the University of Geneva.

Bender’s team has gone on to use these tools to map the topology of the bithorax complex, looking at the way that the Polycomb system of repression restricts access to silenced genes. “Bender envisioned that chromosomal structure or chromosomal domains played a fundamental role in the regulation of the BX-C cluster more than a decade before the proposed histone code hypothesis,” adds Karch, who also nominated Bender for the award.

Bender takes a focused research approach, modeled after Ed Lewis. He says, “I think you want to find a problem, a gene, where you have a lot of information on a small amount of biology and grind down until you’re sure you understand it.”

The Edward Novitski Prize recognizes an extraordinary level of creativity and intellectual ingenuity in the solution of significant problems in genetics research. The prize honors scientific achievement that stands out from other innovative work, that is deeply impressive to creative masters in the field, and that solves a difficult problem in genetics. It also recognizes the beautiful and intellectually ingenious experimental design and execution involved in genetics scientific discovery. Bender will accept the award at TAGC 2020 Online.

The next nomination period will open in September 2020. 

Julie Ahringer has focused her career on understanding development and transcriptional regulation in Caenorhabditis elegans. Along the way her lab has built invaluable tools, including a genome-wide RNAi library, that have supported a huge range of discoveries across biology. In recognition of this work, Ahringer has been awarded the 2020 George W. Beadle Award from the Genetics Society of America for individuals who make outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers.

“Ahringer has distinguished herself in the areas of transcriptional regulation and genome architecture by posing insightful questions and producing groundbreaking publications,” says Judith Kimble of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ahringer’s PhD advisor and one of the researchers who nominated her for the award. “Her community contributions have focused on C. elegans research, but her impact reaches far beyond.”

Ahringer originally thought she’d become an engineer, but after two years of coursework at Lafayette College, she was struggling to choose an undergraduate major. To take her mind off the decision, she read a magazine article about Barbara McClintock and her discovery of DNA transposition, and she immediately decided to turn her problem-solving skills toward making new biological discoveries. Ahringer majored in chemistry, pursued a PhD in biochemistry, and has never looked back.

Her engineer-like approach to detail and methods have served her well in genetics. She started working on C. elegans with Kimble at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s a beautiful and simple animal, having just 1000 somatic cells. It grows from an egg to an adult in three days and is transparent, so you can watch it develop. It’s a great system for studying nearly any aspect of biology.” she says.

As a postdoc she moved to the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge UK, where she studied embryogenesis by making 4D videos of C. elegans mutants using techniques developed in her advisor John White’s group. Working on a mutant of a heterotrimeric G-protein developed by Ronald Plasterk, she helped to uncover the role of the protein in spindle orientation. Her independent lab at the Gurdon Institute launched with studies of spindle orientation and cell polarity and has evolved to focus on chromatin and gene expression in worms.

The C. elegans RNAi feeding library developed out of the Ahringer lab’s search for genes involved in early embryo development and cell polarity. The original plan was to use RNAi to silence thousands of genes by injection in pools and then assess phenotypes of embryonic lethals using 4D videorecordings. “Then postdoc Andrew Fraser had the idea: ‘What if we could make an RNAi library, with a feeding clone for every gene?” The idea seemed a bit crazy and would need money, but Ahringer wrote a letter to the Wellcome Trust and within a week received a supplementary award of £70,000 to support the work. A three-person team set to work on protocols to make the library. After nine months, at the end of 1999, all procedures worked, and they churned out Chromosome I within a month, Ahringer recalls. “Initially, we thought this was mainly for our lab.” But then her group presented the work at conferences in 2000 and were mobbed with library requests. To finish the library, PhD student Ravi Kamath organized the work, and all eight lab members pitched in to make 16,757 RNAi clones.

“Her vision accelerated a stunning swath of C. elegans research. This accomplishment is simple to state but has had (and continues to have) huge impact on the community,” says Paul Sternberg of Caltech, who also nominated Ahringer for the award. “What’s been really rewarding is seeing all the great science that’s been done with the library and across every kind of biology,” Ahringer says.

More recently Ahringer’s group has focused on chromatin and gene expression regulation in C. elegans. They started working on genome-wide mapping of different types of chromatin and where different proteins are binding. They then needed to figure out exactly where promoters were located. This wasn’t yet known because in worms, unlike many other organisms, messenger RNAs are trans-spliced, meaning that promoter locations can’t be inferred from the beginning of the mRNA sequence. That led to painstaking work to identify 45,000 regulatory elements and annotate them. “That is essential because you can’t study transcription if you don’t know where the promoters and enhancers are,” says Ahringer. With those tools they have been studying tissue-specific activities, and they’re now studying how the genome is regulated on a cell-by-cell basis through specific developmental trajectories to understand how cell-type specific gene expression is achieved.

But as with the RNAi library, these datasets are supporting research outside Ahringer’s laboratory. “Her datasets defining regulatory elements, mapping histone modifications, and chromatin binding proteins have become crucial community resources,” Kimble adds. Ahringer has also produced software including BEADS to normalize ChIP-seq data and SeqPlots to visualize diverse genomic data. “Together, these contributions have provided critical tools and key datasets used worldwide,” Kimble says.

In addition to her problem-solving mindset, Ahringer says that watching the work on the worm and human genomes develop when she was a postdoc inspired her to pursue ambitious questions. Conversations at the pub on Friday evenings with John Sulston and other colleagues tossed around interesting ideas and how they might be achieved. “You can do anything if you can work out how to do it: You work out a procedure; you develop your methods; you apply them; and you can do it.” she says.

The George W. Beadle Award honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers. Ahringer will accept the award at TAGC 2020 Online.

The next nomination period will open in September 2020.

Fifteen years ago, Seth Bordenstein and a small group of colleagues started planning a series of lab experiences that would bring cutting edge genetics methods into biology classrooms. Because they worked on Wolbachia microbes that live in half of the world’s arthropod species, they centered the work on these bacterial parasites and started locally with schools near their labs. Within a few years, this education project would take off beyond their wildest expectations, bringing scientists, teachers, and students together from across the United States and around the world. “It was citizen science before that term really took off,” Bordenstein says.

For this project, “Discover the Microbes Within! The Wolbachia Project,” Bordenstein, now Centennial Endowed Professor at Vanderbilt University, is being recognized with the 2020 Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education from the Genetics Society of America. The award recognizes significant impact on genetics education at any level from K-12 through graduate school and beyond.

“Not only is Dr. Bordenstein a true leader in the field of phylosymbiosis and Wolbachia-based biology, but he has also made a demonstrable impact on research-based innovative education,” says Mark Martin of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, one of the scientists who nominated him for the award.

Although Bordenstein is being recognized alone, he notes that the Wolbachia Project is a team effort. He has acted as the project’s principal investigator, but Sarah Bordenstein now serves as project director of the worldwide program. Leveraging her experience in microbial ecology and high school science education, she has ensured that the work meets curriculum standards, has refined the project’s online components, and manages day-to-day operations with students and teachers involved year-round in the project. Other original team members were Bob Minckley, Jack Werren, and Michael Clark of the University of Rochester and educator George Wolfe of International STEM Consultants.

When the initial team formed in 2005, they planned five laboratory activities spanning the gamut of the biological sciences. The labs take students from identifying insects through DNA extraction and analysis and even bioinformatics. They reached out to their local communities, aiming to reach high school teachers or professors at primarily undergraduate institutions. They then presented an initial workshop to 24 educators, providing participants with extensive information about Wolbachia and techniques used in the experiments, such as PCR. They hoped that teachers who participated would then recruit and train others who could keep the project growing.

But the word spread faster than expected: soon teachers beyond the local communities, and even from middle schools, wanted to participate. Then in 2007, Bordenstein received a large grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) that funded the project from 2008 to 2013. “That provided a huge influx of support to scale up what we were doing,” Bordenstein says.  “After 2010, it became a national and internationally known program.”

The HHMI funding also allowed the team to purchase thermocyclers that they could loan to schools, particularly in low-resource communities, and provide pipettes and expensive molecular biology reagents. When students found insects infected with Wolbachia, the team had the organisms sequenced at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA and then provided the FASTA sequence files and chromatograms to the schools for free. Bob Kuhn, a science teacher at Centennial High School outside Atlanta, has noticed the confidence that the Wolbachia project has given his students. “I have had students who may not have sought out this kind of project come to me interested, and at the end of the year they have learned more than they expected.”

The lab materials are open-source and freely available online with no login requirement, so anyone around the world can use them. Bordenstein estimates that tens to hundreds of thousands of students have used the labs in some way. And some of the tools have been repurposed—translated into other languages or used in undergraduate biology courses to introduce biotechnology. Christine Girtain, a New Jersey high school teacher, has partnered with Pirchi Waksman in Israel to create a Global STEM Wolbachia Project. As a result, her students are learning far more than biotechnology, she says “My students are forging international relations and learning about team dynamics, deadlines, time management and scheduling meetings across different time zones.”

Currently the Wolbachia Project does not have dedicated funding. The work has continued in recent years through the outreach components of Bordenstein’s other grants from the National Science Foundation. If they can secure new funding, they would create more digital resources, such as new videos of experiments, provide more thermocyclers, and create a Student Center for Biotechnology information, an online data submission database analogous to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Bordenstein hopes they can extend the original labs to facilitate a 3-foot-by-3-foot worldwide exploration challenge proposed by Bob Kuhn, where students would characterize the arthropods within a plot and screen them for Wolbachia microbes.

Bordenstein’s laboratory research on Wolbachia has flourished, too, but this educational work remains a guiding principle in his career. Bordenstein’s first major grant as an independent researcher was the HHMI science education grant, he notes. “I’m glad it was, because it gave me a sense of the bigger needs out there, the reward beyond just producing knowledge, but sharing it and implementing it with the future scholars of tomorrow.”

The Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education recognizes individuals or groups who have had significant, sustained impact on genetics education at any level, from K-12 through graduate school and beyond.

The next nomination period will open in September 2020.

When Bonnie Bassler was wrapping up her biochemistry PhD at Johns Hopkins University, she heard a research talk at a small conference in Baltimore that switched on a light and changed her career. A geneticist described how groups of bioluminescent marine Vibrio bacteria could start glowing simultaneously. “I’m sitting there thinking ‘Holy Smokes, how is it that I have never heard the idea that bacteria can do things together?’” she says. She’d never taken a genetics course, but she ran up to the podium afterwards and begged the speaker, Michael Silverman of the Agouron Institute, for a postdoctoral position. She says, “I worked elbow-to-elbow with him, and that’s how I became a geneticist.”

That decision to pursue genetics and a project that, at the time, was viewed as a quirky effect in a fringe bacterial species led Bassler to reshape how scientists view the microbial world. Following up on the initial work of Woody Hastings and Silverman, Bassler’s team at Princeton University discovered that Vibrio bacteria use multiple chemical signals to communicate. Based on those initial discoveries, Bassler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, and since then her work on communication among a range of bacterial species has been recognized with other notable honors including the Shaw Prize in 2015.

She hasn’t stopped blazing new trails with bacteria. For these achievements, Bassler has been awarded the 2020 Genetics Society of America Medal for outstanding contributions in the field of genetics in the last 15 years. “Bonnie’s work has illustrated how bacteria communicate constantly via small molecules, both within and between species. Her work has enormous implications for understanding biofilms and has potentially great future impact for understanding the human microbiome and how to manipulate it to treat human diseases,” says Ronald Vale of UCSF, one of the scientists who nominated Bassler for the award.

“Bacteria need to understand: am I alone or am I in a group? because they need to behave differently in those two scenarios,” Bassler says. To do this, bacteria make and release chemical signal molecules known as autoinducers. As bacteria reproduce and increase in number, the external autoinducer concentration likewise increases. Detection of accumulated autoinducer alerts bacteria that there are other bacterial cells in the vicinity. “In unison, all the bacteria change their behavior. This process is called quorum sensing and hundreds of bacterial behaviors are involved, including virulence.” Bassler showed that, in addition to conveying information about cell numbers, autoinducers encode information that identify a neighbor as a close relative, as a “cousin” from a related species, or as an unrelated outsider.

Bassler has used a suite of scientific tools to decode the languages that bacteria use to communicate and act collectively. “She always begins her studies with elegant genetic analyses, and then she underpins her mutant phenotypes with biochemistry, structure, chemistry, and biophysics approaches to comprehensively answer fundamental questions about cell-cell communication and bacterial collective behaviors,” says Ned Wingreen of Princeton, who also nominated Bassler for the award.

These research questions drive how Bassler’s team pairs other methods with genetics. Initially, after identifying autoinducer synthase genes, they needed chemistry to decode the molecular “words” comprising the bacterial lexicon, and then structural biology to characterize the receptors bacteria use to detect those molecules. Bassler’s team has also used imaging and microfluidic devices to explore how flow, corners, curves, and eddies affect bacterial quorum sensing in environments that mimic nature. When students and postdocs bring ingenious questions, her job is not to be “too chicken” to adopt new approaches to answer them, Bassler says. She and her team learn new techniques together, and she often works with expert collaborators.

Most recently, Bassler’s team has started exploring more complex questions about how quorum sensing occurs in realistic situations, with mixtures of different bacterial species, viruses, and even eukaryotic cells. For example, her lab has shown that a Vibrio phage can eavesdrop on bacterial quorum sensing. This ability allows the phage to time the killing of its bacterial host to the optimal moment, when host cell numbers are at their peak. This insidious strategy enables the phage to maximize its chances of transmission to the next host cell.

“What I’m most excited about right now is the breadth of organisms participating in quorum-sensing conversations, from viruses to bacteria to eukaryotes,” she says. Other horizons include understanding exactly how bacteria compute blends of autoinducer signals in complex situations. “When all these organisms are making, destroying, hijacking, freeriding, cheating, and eavesdropping on the signal molecules, how does anybody get robust information?” she asks.

Addressing these fundamental scientific questions could shape medicine and human health in several ways. Researchers could develop medicines that interfere with bacterial quorum sensing to halt infections, improve communication between beneficial species in the human microbiome, or perhaps produce new bacterial strains that use quorum sensing to promote health.

Despite the revolution in microbiology over the last 25 years, there’s a still a danger that researchers could underestimate what bacteria can accomplish, Bassler says. “I’m focusing on overarching principles and trying not give these bacteria short shrift.” She has been gratified by the amazing energy and growth surrounding bacterial research. She adds, “I’m proud that this reawakening started with this little glow-in-the-dark guy.”

The Genetics Society of America Medal honors an individual member of the Society for outstanding contributions to the field of genetics in the last 15 years. GSA established the Medal in 1981 to recognize members who exemplify the ingenuity of the GSA membership through elegant and highly meaningful contributions to modern genetics.

Nominations for the 2021 GSA Awards will open in September 2020.

For more than 50 years, Gerald Fink of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and David Botstein of Calico Life Sciences have made unique, and sometimes intersecting, contributions to genetics. Together they taught an advanced genetics course at MIT for more than a decade; they’ve co-authored a series of perspective papers and patents. Each has mentored dozens of successful scientists. And this year they are the co-recipients of the 2020 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal for lifetime achievement in genetics from the Genetics Society of America.

Fink is recognized for the discovery of principles central to genome organization and regulation in eukaryotic cells. Botstein is honored for contributions that include developing methods for defining genetic pathways, mapping genomes, and analyzing gene expression.

“They have each been so important in moving the field forward,” says Erika Matunis, GSA’s Secretary of the Board and Chair of the Awards Committee. “In the end the Board of Directors decided that they both independently merited the medal.”

Gerald Fink: Field Transformer

Fink’s work in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae led to our deep understanding of gene expression control in eukaryotic metabolism. He started working with the organism as a Yale graduate student spurred by the recent discovery in bacteria of operons—clusters of genes with related function controlled by a shared regulatory element transcribed into a single messenger RNA. When he began his own lab at Cornell University, he had set his sights on answering the unresolved question of whether operons also existed in eukaryotes.

When Fink’s career began, the discovery of DNA and the molecular biology revolution had changed little about the study of yeast genetics because there was no method to introduce DNA into a yeast cell, a critical step for tinkering with genes in vivo. Then in 1977 Fink and his group discovered a method to transform yeast with DNA. Yeast transformation allowed the introduction of a DNA molecule from any organism into yeast cells and enabled the manipulation of the expression of those genes. Yeast transformation advanced the field by making it possible to do gene editing and targeting and paved the way for the commercial use of yeast as a factory for manufacturing vaccines and other chemicals.

Once they had the ability to transform yeast, Fink and his group were able to tackle the operon question. They cloned the HIS4 locus, yeast’s best candidate for an operon and showed that it in fact encoded a single multifunctional protein, rather than multiple proteins under common regulation. This finding suggested that eukaryotes were not likely to have bacterial-style operons.

Fink continued to pursue the question of how eukaryotes regulate their genes, as well as many others that piqued his interest.  He helped launch the careers of over 100 students and postdoctoral fellows by sharing his research problems. “My students worked on a problem, and then they took it with them,” he says, describing the guiding principle of his lab. “So I was constantly scrambling for new problems.”  Fink’s mentoring principle worked well as many of his students have had successful academic careers; seven of them are now members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Many of Fink’s research problems also created whole new directions for the field. Fink and his students showed that many genes related to amino acid biosynthesis were controlled by a single master regulator—the transcription factor Gcn4p. In addition, inspired by Barbara McClintock’s work on jumping genes in maize, Fink and his postdocs discovered that yeast transposable elements, known as Ty elements, move around the chromosomes through retrotransposition via an RNA intermediate. Another student discovered that yeast could divide by a distinct developmental pathway, producing filaments instead of buds. This discovery led Fink’s lab to investigate the genetic wiring that controlled filamentation in both Saccharomyces and in the pathogenic fungus Candida albicans.

“Fink’s research contributions are legion and legendary,” says Jeremy Thorner of the University of California, Berkeley and one of the scientists who nominated Fink for the Morgan Medal. “In addition, he has served the scientific community in important and prominent ways.”  In 1970 Fink co-founded the influential yeast genetics course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and taught it for 17 years, sharing his knowledge widely through the yeast community. Many of the students went on to highly successful scientific careers, including three Nobel laureates.

Fink was one of the founders of MIT’s Whitehead Institute and served as its Director for a dozen years. He also served as president of both the Genetics Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. After the 2001 anthrax attacks, Fink chaired a National Research Council committee on bioterrorism. This committee of scientists, ethicists, and lawyers produced an influential report: “Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism: Confronting the Dual Use Dilemma” also known as the Fink Report due to his imprimatur on this influential document.

David Botstein: Tool Trailblazer

David Botstein’s genetics research has spanned from phage to humans, tackling key questions related to gene organization and disease and outlining critical mapping work that launched the Human Genome Project. “At every stage of his career, David Botstein has pioneered breathtakingly broad and interesting science. He has developed and popularized generally-applicable tools for genetic analysis and has broken new ground as a teacher and mentor,” says Nancy Kleckner of Harvard University, a former Botstein postdoc, the 2016 Morgan Medal recipient, and one of the scientists who nominated him for the Medal.

When describing his career, Botstein emphasizes the last part. “I always thought of myself as a teacher,” he says. “To really teach about science, you have to be doing science.” As an MIT instructor, he focused on laboratory teaching and helping students think about how to design, carry out, and analyze experiments. “I was rewarded with the best graduate students wanting to work with me,” he says.

At MIT, Stanford University, and Princeton University, he has mentored more than 100 graduate students and postdocs. More than half are successful academic researchers. Nine are members of the US National Academy of Sciences, and three have already received the Thomas Hunt Morgan medal.

After initially uncovering fundamental features of Salmonella phage P22 genome organization and activity while a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Botstein co-discovered transposable drug resistance elements in bacteria.

In the 1970s, he started working on yeast, with an eye toward applying DNA sequencing to gene analysis. (He took Fink’s CSHL yeast genetics course during its second year.) In 1980, Botstein, Ray White, Mark Skolnick, and Ron Davis outlined how researchers could use restriction fragment length polymorphisms to map the human genome. Though essentially a research prospectus, those ideas paved the way for the Human Genome Project and the entire field of genomics.

That line of research allowed them to link those DNA polymorphisms with disease phenotypes, leading to the mapping and cloning of 1700 disease-related genes, including those linked to Huntington’s Disease and cystic fibrosis. Botstein also worked with fellow geneticist Patrick Brown and others on the development of microarrays to measure gene expression, a technique that was key in opening up the modern era of genome-wide analysis. In 2000, Botstein, Brown and their team built on this approach to classify human breast tumors into subtypes based on their microarray gene expression profiles. “That has had a big direct clinical effect because there are tests out there now that can tell women how much they should worry about their tumors and how aggressive treatment they need,” he says.

Over the decades of his career, Botstein became concerned by the structure of scientific training. Increasingly, he observed two trends: undergraduate students didn’t receive a sufficiently rigorous education across scientific disciplines, and PhD scientists didn’t achieve research independence until sometime in their 40s. In 2003, he moved to Princeton to take on these issues as leader of the Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics. Undergraduates took a two-year rigorous curriculum across math, physics, chemistry, and biology and could then major in any scientific discipline. At the same time, the Institute supported early career research fellows, nominated directly out of graduate school, who received five years of funding to pursue their own projects and participate in undergraduate teaching. “They did so much better than any subset of postdocs,” Botstein says. “I felt that was a great success.”

Throughout his career, Botstein has viewed the researchers in his group, from undergraduates to postdocs, as collaborators, “who knew a little less than I did.”

“Both Botstein and I pride ourselves in the cultivation of our students,” Fink adds. “That’s your legacy.”

Gerald Fink and David Botstein will accept their medals at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC) 2020, held April 22–26, 2020.

The Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal is awarded to individual GSA members for lifetime achievement in the field of genetics, recognizing the full body of work of exceptional geneticists. Recipients will have made substantial contributions to genetics throughout their careers and will have a strong history as a mentor to fellow geneticists.

GSA established the Medal in 1981 and named it in honor of Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945). Morgan received the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work with Drosophila and his “discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity.” Morgan’s studies of the white mutation and discovery of sex-linked inheritance provided the first experimental evidence that chromosomes are the carriers of genetic information. Subsequent studies in his laboratory led to the discovery of recombination and the first genetic maps.

Nominations for the 2021 GSA Awards will open in September 2020.