David Botstein - Biography

David Botstein (born 1942 in Switzerland) is an American biologist who has been the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University since 2003.

He graduated from Harvard in 1963 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967. He then taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a Professor of Genetics. Dr. Botstein joined Genentech, Inc. in 1987 as Vice President-Science. In 1990, he became Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University. Dr. Botstein was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and to the Institute of Medicine in 1993.

Botstein is the director of the Integrated Science Program at Princeton University. Many Integrated Science students have gone on to be successful in the field of molecular biology.

In 1980, Botstein and his colleagues Ray White, Mark Skolnick, and Ronald W. Davis proposed a method for constructing a genetic linkage map using restriction fragment length polymorphisms that was used in subsequent years to identify several human disease genes including Huntington's and BRCA1. Variations of this method were used in the mapping efforts that predated and enabled the sequencing phase of the Human Genome Project.

In 1998, Botstein and his postdoctoral fellow Michael Eisen, together with graduate student Paul Spellman and colleague Patrick Brown, developed a statistical method and graphical interface that is widely used to interpret genomic data including microarray data. He has subsequently worked on the creation of the influential Gene Ontology with Michael Ashburner and Gerald Rubin. He is one of the founding editors of the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, along with Erkki Ruoslahti and Keith R. Yamamoto .

Botstein has won the Eli Lilly and Company Award in Microbiology (1978), the Genetics Society of America Medal (1988, with Ira Herskowitz), the Allan Award of the American Society of Human Genetics (1989, with Ray White), the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2003) and the Albany Medical Center Prize (2010, with Eric Lander and Francis Collins).

Botstein is an alumnus of Camp Rising Sun. He is the brother of the conductor Leon Botstein. Both of Botstein's parents were physicians.

External Links

• David Botstein iBioMagazine talk: An Integrated Science Curriculum