The researcher who performed key recombination experiments in the early 1970s and advanced the field of reverse genetics was awarded this year’s genetics prize from the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in the US Virgin Islands.
Established in 2001, the award — which comes with a gold medal and an unrestricted $500,000 cash award — this year went to Ronald Davis, a pioneer in innovative biotechnologies, the foundation announced yesterday. Davis, director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center in California, has a long list of firsts. Among them, he was the first to clone a eukaryotic gene using lambda phage vectors (now a mainstay of DNA cloning techniques); he developed the first artificially constructed chromosomes; he carried out the first targeted gene deletions; and he was part of the team that constructed the first genetic linkage map of the human genome.
“He’s a magician with DNA,” says last year’s Gruber Prize winner Gerald Fink, a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “He comes up with new approaches that make what used to seem impossible possible, and he’s given that sense of craftsmanship to all the people that pass through his lab.”
Later in his career, Davis helped pioneer many modern genomic approaches, including microarrays, sequencing machines and DNA synthesis techniques. In recent years, however, Davis has shifted his focus away from basic genetic tools and into medical applications. “When you look at our medical system you realize that it’s limited by the technology that’s available,” he says.
To this end, he’s developed diagnostic platforms to detect protein biomarkers as well as new strategies for drug screening and production. Last year, he even published his first paper in Nature Medicine, which describes a method for isolating neutrophils — the most abundant type of white blood cell — from small blood samples as a way to measure the body’s immune response to traumatic injury.
“He’s a creative genius at working through what the rate limiting step is at moving science forward,” says Steve Elledge, a geneticist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who also was a postdoc in Davis’ lab in the 1980s. “He’s developed technology that has really lifted the boats of everyone in the field.”
Davis will receive the prize and deliver a lecture in October at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in Montreal.
Image: Ronald Davis