Rudolf Jaenisch (born April 22, 1942) is a Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the

Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally indepen ...

. He is a pioneer of transgenic science, in which an animal’s genetic makeup is altered. Jaenisch has focused on creating genetically modified mice to study

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal bl ...

and neurological diseases.
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Research

Jaenisch’s first breakthrough occurred in 1974 when he and Beatrice Mintz showed that foreign DNA could be integrated into the DNA of early mouse

embryo An embryo is an initial stage of development of a multicellular organism. In organisms that reproduce sexually, embryonic development is the part of the life cycle that begins just after fertilization of the female egg cell by the male sperm ...

s. They injected

retrovirus A retrovirus is a type of virus that inserts a DNA copy of its RNA genome into the DNA of a host cell that it invades, thus changing the genome of that cell. Once inside the host cell's cytoplasm, the virus uses its own reverse transcriptase ...

DNA into early mouse embryos and showed that leukemia DNA sequences had integrated into the mouse

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding ...

and also to its offspring. These mice were the first transgenic mammals in history. His current research focuses on the

epigenetic In biology, epigenetics is the study of stable phenotypic changes (known as ''marks'') that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence. The Greek prefix '' epi-'' ( "over, outside of, around") in ''epigenetics'' implies features that are " ...

regulation of

gene expression Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product that enables it to produce end products, protein or non-coding RNA, and ultimately affect a phenotype, as the final effect. ...

, which has led to major advances in creating embryonic stem cells and “ induced pluripotent stem" (IPS) cells, as well as their therapeutic applications. In 2007, Jaenisch’s laboratory was one of the first three laboratories world-wide to report reprogramming cells taken from a mouse's tail into IPS cells. Jaenisch has since shown therapeutic benefits of IPS cell-based treatment for sickle-cell anemia and

Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms usually emerge slowly, and as the disease worsens, non-motor symptoms becom ...

in mice. Additional research focuses on the epigenetic mechanisms involved in cancer and brain development. Jaenisch’s therapeutic cloning research deals exclusively with mice, but he is an advocate for using the same techniques with human cells in order to advance embryonic stem cell research. However, in 2001 Jaenisch made a public case against human reproductive cloning, testifying to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee and an editorial in

Science magazine ''Science'', also widely referred to as ''Science Magazine'', is the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and one of the world's top academic journals. It was first published in 1880, ...

Career

Jaenisch received his doctorate in medicine from the

University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: link=no, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Originally established as the University of ...

in 1967, preferring the laboratory to the clinic. He became a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, studying bacteriophages. He left Germany in 1970 for research positions at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

, Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research and the

Salk Institute The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, U.S. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vacci ...

. He returned to Germany in 1977 to become the head of the Department of Tumor Virology at the

Heinrich Pette Institute The Leibniz Institute of Virology was founded in 1948 by Heinrich Pette, a German neurologist. It began as a research facility to create a polio vaccine. It is now a private foundation and involved with basic research in virology and the immune re ...

at the

University of Hamburg The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vor ...

. He arrived at MIT in 1984. He participated in the 2005 science conference on human cloning at the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmonizi ...

and serves on the science advisory boards of the Genetics Policy Institute and Stemgent. He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the

Infosys Prize The Infosys Prize is an annual award given to scientists, researchers, engineers and social scientists of Indian origin (not necessarily born in India) by the Infosys Science Foundation and ranks among the highest monetary awards in India to re ...

in 2010.

Awards and honors

* 2001 Inaugural Genetics Prize of the

Gruber Foundation The Gruber Foundation is a philanthropic foundation established by Peter and Patricia Gruber and is based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Its mission is to honor and encourage excellence in the fields of cosmology, genetics, neurosc ...

* 2002 Robert Koch Prize * 2003 Election as a member of

U.S. National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Natio ...

* 2006 Max Delbrück Medal * 2007 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science * 2008 Massry Prize from the

Keck School of Medicine The Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California teaches and trains physicians, biomedical scientists and other healthcare professionals, conducts medical research, and treats patients. Founded in 1885, it is the second oldest ...

* 2009

Ernst Schering Prize The Ernst Schering Prize is awarded annually by the Ernst Schering Foundation for especially outstanding basic research in the fields of medicine, biology or chemistry anywhere in the world. Established in 1991 by the Ernst Schering Research Foun ...

* 2010

National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social scienc ...

* 2011

Wolf Prize in Medicine The Wolf Prize in Medicine is awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics and Arts. The ...

*201
International Society for Stem Cell Research
McEwen Innovation Award * 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science from the

Franklin Institute The Franklin Institute is a science museum and the center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memor ...

* 2013 Passano Award * 2014 Otto Warburg Medal * 2015 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology * 2016

Semantic Scholar Semantic Scholar is an artificial intelligence–powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI and publicly released in November 2015. It uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries ...

AI program included Jaenisch on its list of top ten most influential biomedical researchers.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jaenisch, Rudolf 1942 births Living people Fellows of the AACR Academy 20th-century German biologists German geneticists History of genetics Knights Commander of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany Massry Prize recipients Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences People from Bystrzyca Kłodzka Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class) Whitehead Institute faculty Wolf Prize in Medicine laureates Members of the National Academy of Medicine University of Hamburg faculty Fox Chase Cancer Center people