Albert Lasker
Basic Medical Research Award

Award Description

Mark Ptashne
For elegant and incisive discoveries leading to the understanding of how regulatory proteins control the transcription of genes.

One of the great achievements of contemporary biology is its foundation in molecular genetics and the remarkable progress that has been made in understanding how genes work. Genes are nothing more than discrete stretches of DNA that contain within them the blueprint for producing the proteins upon which life depends. The important question is this: What regulates the genetic machinery? The mechanisms by which genes are turned on, and then turned off when their job is done, are essential to our knowledge of development and disease.

Mark Ptashne is an acknowledged founder of molecular studies of gene regulation. For three decades he has kept his scientific eye on this single target and, in so doing, laid the conceptual framework on which many other investigators have built their research. His major accomplishment has been to figure out how "regulatory molecules" control the function of genes. In the early phase of his research, focusing on bacteriophage, a simple virus that grows in a bacterium, he and his colleagues discovered a series of fundamental mechanisms for how genes are switched on and off. Then turning his attention to higher organisms his laboratory showed, much to the surprise of many, that the very principles that explain gene regulation in lower organisms apply to higher organisms as well. These discoveries are now so deeply ingrained in contemporary science that it is possible to forget their wide-ranging significance.