Sherman Morton Weissman is an American scientist and the Sterling Professor of Genetics at the

Yale School of Medicine The Yale School of Medicine is the graduate medical school at Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1810 as the Medical Institution of Yale College and formally opened in 1813. The primary te ...

. A mentor to

Francis Collins Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950) is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He is the former director of the National Institutes of Health ( ...

, Weissman elucidated the nucleic acid sequence of the

SV40 SV40 is an abbreviation for simian vacuolating virus 40 or simian virus 40, a polyomavirus that is found in both monkeys and humans. Like other polyomaviruses, SV40 is a DNA virus that has the potential to cause tumors in animals, but most often ...

genome.

Biography

Weissman was the son of a general practitioner. After attending

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...

, Weissman interned at

Boston City Hospital The Boston City Hospital (1864–1996), in Boston, Massachusetts, was a public hospital, located in the South End. It was "intended for the use and comfort of poor patients, to whom medical care will be provided at the expense of the city, and . ...

and was a research fellow with the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

and the

National Cancer Institute The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...

before taking a faculty position at Yale.Sherman Morton Weissman, MD

. Retrieved January 1, 2016. Weissman mentored

, the director of the NIH, during Collins's postdoctoral fellowship at Yale. Collins called Weissman "the smartest guy" he has met and credited Weissman with allowing him to establish autonomy as a researcher. In Weissman's lab, Collins developed the technique known as

chromosome jumping Chromosome jumping is a tool of molecular biology that is used in the physical mapping of genomes. It is related to several other tools used for the same purpose, including chromosome walking. Chromosome jumping is used to bypass regions difficul ...

. In 1978, Weissman published the complete nucleic acid sequence of the

genome. A week later, Belgian researcher

Walter Fiers Walter Fiers (31 January 1931 in Ypres, West Flanders – 28 July 2019 in Destelbergen) was a Belgian molecular biologist. He obtained a degree of Engineer for Chemistry and Agricultural Industries at the University of Ghent in 1954, and started ...

published the genome sequence in another journal. Until years earlier, the Weissman and Fiers teams had each been working on separate halves of the sequence. As technology allowed for faster sequencing, each team began to work toward sequencing the entire genome on its own. In the months before he came up with the published sequence, Weissman had to retract several "final" sequences once errors were discovered. Weissman was elected to the

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 Nati ...

in 1983. Weissman's seven children include

Jonathan Weissman Jonathan S. Weissman is the Landon T. Clay Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the Whitehead Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. From 1996 to 2020, he was a faculty member in ...

, a scientist at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. Jonathan's mother is Myrna Weissman, a professor of epidemiology in psychiatry at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Weissman, Sherman Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American geneticists Northwestern University alumni Harvard Medical School alumni Yale School of Medicine faculty Yale Sterling Professors Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences