Carnegie’s Joseph G. Gall And XXXXX Win Nobel

October 2, 2006

Contact Joe Gall, at 410-246-3017, or 3027, email gall@ciwemb.edu; or Allan Spradling at 410-246-3021 or 3015, email spradling@ciwemb.edu

Or Tina McDowell PIO at 202-939-1120, tmcdowell@ciw.edu

 

Link to Nobel site http://nobelprize.org/index.html

Link to recent interview http://www.laskerfoundation.org/2006videoawards/qt_high/special/index.htm

Link to the Gall Lab site http://www.ciwemb.edu/labs/gall/index.php

Link to pictures http://www.carnegieinstitution.org/joseph_gall/

 

 

Baltimore, MD—The Nobel Foundation awarded the Carnegie Institutions’ Joseph G. Gall the prestigious Nobel Prize today. Gall is a founder of modern cell biology. He invented in situ hybridization and has made landmark contributions to the field of chromosome structure and function.

 

Gall has been staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology and adjunct professor of The Johns Hopkins University since 1983, and a Professor of Developmental Genetics of the American Cancer Society since 1984. His in situ hybridization technique, developed with graduate students Mary Lou Pardue and Susan Gerbi in 1969, is a powerful method that allows researchers to locate and map genes and specific sequences of DNA on a chromosome. It revolutionized molecular biology and is now used worldwide in gene studies.

 

“Joe Gall’s achievements are a realization of Andrew Carnegie’s original dream,” remarked Carnegie president Richard Meserve. “Carnegie believed that if exceptional individuals are set free to work in an environment without constraints extraordinary discoveries will result.”

 

Education and Career Path

As a teenager, Gall spent summers on a farm in northern Virginia, where his interest in the natural world flourished. “After much urging, my parents bought me a microscope when I was 14 years old—not one of the toys I had struggled with up to that time, but the real thing,” he reflected. Without a local high school to attend, Gall was sent to a boarding school near Charlottesville, Virginia, where after three years the headmaster thought he was ready to go to college. “How Yale was chosen I am not sure, but I arrived in New Haven in June 1945, just as the Second World War was coming to a close.”

 

Gall received his B.S. from Yale University in zoology in 1949 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1952. Between 1952 and 1964, he taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he became Professor of Zoology. In 1963 he returned to Yale as part of his sabbatical, but before his year was over he was offered a position as Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. In an unusual twist to an academic career, he decided to leave Yale in 1983 to join Carnegie’s Department of Embryology so he could conduct research full time.

 

Research

Gall’s career-long interest is how the structure of the cell, particularly the nucleus, is related to the synthesis and processing of ribonucleic acid, RNA, during gene activity. He specifically looks at changes in the chromosomes and other nuclear components when RNA is synthesized, processed, and transported from the cell’s nucleus to the cytoplasm. The in situ hybridization technique takes advantage of the feature that DNA and RNA bond to each other via their complementary sequences. Gall and colleagues developed their technique of labeling RNA with a radioactive label and placing it on cells on a microscope slide. The RNA hybridizes, or binds, with its complement on the DNA and is detected by its radioactivity. This technique allows researchers to see where genes are and determine whether a gene has been turned on in developing embryos. The advent of fluorescent tags have increased the sensitivity and precision.

 

Gall’s development of in situ hybridization was a byproduct of his renowned research on the so-called lampbrush chromosomes—the largest chromosomes in any animal. They reside in amphibian eggs and were named when first viewed in the nineteenth century because they look like brushes then used to clean the narrow chimneys of lamps. Gall looks at the unlaid eggs from the frog Xenopus, which are up to 1.5 millimeters (mm) in diameter, with a nucleus, or germinal vesicle (GV), that is 0.4 mm in diameter. Their large size makes them ideal for understanding chromosome structure and function, Gall’s research area since the 1940s. Gall made many discoveries about genes in the lampbrush chromosome including gene amplification in which extra copies of DNA are created at certain times in the oocyte. Similar extra copies of genes are often seen in cancer cells.

 

Current Interests

Gall has worked with various organisms over the years, from frogs to the fruit fly. It has generally been thought that various factors involved in RNA synthesis travel separately to active genes on the chromosomes for processing. Using Xenopus eggs, Gall now studies this process. By watching fluorescently tagged molecules, he is able to determine where these factors move. This tracking has led Gall and others to propose that the processing machinery is assembled in structures in the GV, called Cajal bodies, named for the man who described them 100 years ago, Spanish neurobiologist and Nobel laureate Ramón y Cajal.

 

Allan Spradling, department director of Carnegie’s Department of Embryology commented on Gall’s influence: “Joe Gall stands out especially because of the way he has done cutting-edge science throughout a long career. A true scholar of biology, he repeatedly turns his deep knowledge of diverse biological systems and of the forgotten lore of science history into novel experimental approaches that have sometimes spawned whole new fields of study. He shares his unmatched knowledge of microscopy in a unique course combining mathematically rigorous optics with a hands-on examination of historic instruments from every major phase of the field's development. All of these activities are carried out with the highest standards of integrity, respect for others, genuine modesty and with a sheer joy at the pleasures of discovery that seems undiminished from the days when he roamed the Virginia fields with his butterfly net and microscope. In short, Joe Gall's approach to science has long been an inspiration to others and I feel fortunate to count myself among those who have benefited enormously from his example.”

 

Honors and Awards

Joe Gall has received numerous other awards over the years for his scientific research, among them the 2004 Society for Developmental Biology Lifetime Achievement Award and the 1996 American Association for the Advancement of Science Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement. He also received the E. B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology in 1993 and the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale University in 1988. Gall is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968), the National Academy of Sciences (1972), the American Philosophical Society (1989). Just last Friday he was awarded the prestigious Special Achievement Award by the Lasker Foundation.

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Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institution (www.CarnegieInstitution.org) in 1902 as an organization for scientific discovery. The Department of Embryology, founded in 1913 in affiliation with the Anatomy Department of Johns Hopkins University, is one of six departments within the institution. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.