William Martin Gelbart (September 11, 1945 - August 11, 2015) was an American geneticist and a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University. He was best known for his work with fly genetics, the discovery of decapentaplegic (dpp), and the formation of Flybase. He was a member of the National Advisory Council for the

Human Genome Project The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a ...

Early life and education

Gelbart was born in Brooklyn and earned his B.S. in biology from

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

in 1966 and a PhD in genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1971 with Allen S. Fox.

Career and research

Gelbart did his postdoctoral work with Edward B. Lewis at Caltech and Art Chovnick at the University of Connecticut. He began his career at Harvard University in 1976 before becoming a full professor in 1983. His research was focused on molecular basis of pattern formation using the fruit fly as a model system. Using transvection, his group identified decapentaplegic, an locus containing an ortholog of human bone morphogenetic proteins. Gelbart was a major leader in consolidating the findings of the Drosophila community into Flybase along with Michael Ashburner, Rachel Drysdale, Gerry Rubin, Thom Kaufman and Kathy Matthews.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gelbart, William Martin Harvard University faculty Brooklyn College alumni University of Wisconsin alumni American geneticists 1945 births 2015 deaths