James A. Shapiro
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James Alan Shapiro (born May 18, 1943) is an
American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...
biologist, an expert in
bacterial genetics Bacterial genetics is the subfield of genetics devoted to the study of bacterial genes. Bacterial genetics are subtly different from eukaryotic genetics, however bacteria still serve as a good model for animal genetic studies. One of the major dis ...
and a professor in the Department of
Biochemistry Biochemistry or biological chemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology and ...
and
Molecular Biology Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions. The study of chemical and physi ...
at the
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
.


Academic biography

Shapiro obtained his Bachelor's degree in English from
Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher lea ...
in 1964. Then, inspired by a
genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...
course he had taken as a senior, he shifted from English to science. He was awarded a
Marshall scholarship The Marshall Scholarship is a postgraduate scholarship for "intellectually distinguished young Americans ndtheir country's future leaders" to study at any university in the United Kingdom. It is widely considered one of the most prestigious sc ...
for postgraduate research at
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Corpus Christi College (full name: "The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary", often shortened to "Corpus"), is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. From the late 14th century through to the early 19th century ...
from 1964 to 1967, spending his final year at
Hammersmith Hammersmith is a district of West London, England, southwest of Charing Cross. It is the administrative centre of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, and identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London. ...
hospital under the supervision of William Hayes, and being awarded a PhD in genetics in 1968. His thesis, ''The Structure of the Galactose Operon in Escherichia coli K12'', contains the first suggestion of transposable elements in bacteria. He confirmed this hypothesis in 1968 during his postdoctoral tenure as a Jane Coffin Childs fellow in the laboratory of François Jacob at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. As an American Cancer Society fellow in
Jon Beckwith Jonathan Roger Beckwith (born December 25, 1935, in Cambridge, Massachusetts) is an American microbiologist and geneticist. He is the American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School ...
’s laboratory at the
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 ...
1968-70, he and his colleagues used in vivo genetic manipulations to clone and purify the lac operon of E. coli. He was troubled by the potential
genetic engineering Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification or genetic manipulation, is the modification and manipulation of an organism's genes using technology. It is a set of technologies used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including t ...
applications of his research. He served as Invited Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Havana, Cuba 1970-1972, before returning to another postdoctorate with Harlyn Halvorson at
Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , pro ...
. Since 1973, he has worked as a professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago. In 1975 Shapiro attended the ICN-
UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...
Squaw Valley Symposium on Bacterial
Plasmid A plasmid is a small, extrachromosomal DNA molecule within a cell that is physically separated from chromosomal DNA and can replicate independently. They are most commonly found as small circular, double-stranded DNA molecules in bacteria; how ...
s, where his interest in DNA restructuring in bacteria was heightened by learning about the movements of antibiotic resistance transposons to new genomic locations. This prompted him to organize, in collaboration with Sankar Adhya and the late Ahmed Bukhari,the first meeting on the topic of DNA insertion elements at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in 1976. Although they expected only a few colleagues, the meeting was attended by over 150 scientists from around the world, including
Barbara McClintock Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There s ...
. McClintock had first identified
transposition (horizontal gene transfer) Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) or lateral gene transfer (LGT) is the movement of genetic material between unicellular and/or multicellular organisms other than by the ("vertical") transmission of DNA from parent to offspring (reproduction). H ...
(movement to new genomic location) of DNA "controlling elements" in maize (sweetcorn) in 1948, for which discovery she was awarded a Nobel Prize 1983. Shapiro and McClintock continued their collaboration up until her death in 1992. He has also been a visiting professor from time to time, including once as a Darwin Prize Visiting Professor at the
University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...
in 1994.


Research

While working with Beckwith at Harvard, Shapiro was lead author of the first team to isolate a single
gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...
from an organism. The gene they isolated was ''
lacZ The ''lactose'' operon (''lac'' operon) is an operon required for the transport and metabolism of lactose in ''E. coli'' and many other enteric bacteria. Although glucose is the preferred carbon source for most bacteria, the ''lac'' operon allows ...
'', which codes for the
β-galactosidase β-Galactosidase (EC 3.2.1.23, lactase, beta-gal or β-gal; systematic name β-D-galactoside galactohydrolase), is a glycoside hydrolase enzyme that catalyst, catalyzes hydrolysis of terminal non-reducing β-D-galactose residues in β-D-galactosi ...
enzyme Enzymes () are proteins that act as biological catalysts by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different molecules known as products. A ...
used by ''
E. coli ''Escherichia coli'' (),Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. also known as ''E. coli'' (), is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus ''Escher ...
'' bacteria to digest the sugars in milk. Their technique involved transduction to clone oppositely oriented copies of the gene inserted into two specialized transducing bacteriophages, then mixing single-stranded DNA from the two phages so that only the bacterial sequences would form a double helix, and finally using a
nuclease A nuclease (also archaically known as nucleodepolymerase or polynucleotidase) is an enzyme capable of cleaving the phosphodiester bonds between nucleotides of nucleic acids. Nucleases variously effect single and double stranded breaks in their ta ...
to degrade the single-stranded phage sequences, leaving only the double-stranded ''lacZ'' DNA. In a paper published in the ''
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sci ...
'' in 1979, Shapiro was the first to propose
replicative transposition Replicative transposition is a mechanism of transposition in molecular biology, proposed by James A. Shapiro in 1979, in which the transposable element is duplicated during the reaction, so that the transposing entity is a copy of the original elem ...
as a detailed molecular mechanism for genetic mobility by transposable elements, such as the Tn3 ampicillin resistance transposon and transposing bacteriophage Mu. In this model, the ends of transposable elements covalently bond to target site DNA sequences to via a process that forms an intermediate structure with replication forks at each end of the transposing element, sometimes called a "Shapiro intermediate". In other research, Shapiro showed that bacteria organize themselves spatially as they grow in communities on agar surfaces. For instance, he analyzed how each strain of the sometimes pathogenic bacterium Proteus mirabilis forms its own pattern of complex terraced rings by periodic group “swarm" migration, an emergent property that can be explained by mathematical rules derived by a physicist collaborator, Sergei Esipov. Shapiro related this to other complex multicellular behaviors, such as hunting, building protective structures, spreading spores, and individual bacteria sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the larger community. Based on this work, Shapiro believes that cooperative behavior is a fundamental organizing concept for biological activity at all levels of complexity.


Natural genetic engineering

He has proposed the term
natural genetic engineering Natural genetic engineering (NGE) is a class of process proposed by molecular biologist James A. Shapiro to account for novelty created in the course of biological evolution. Shapiro developed this work in several peer-reviewed publications from 19 ...
to account for how novelty is created in the course of biological evolution. It has been criticized by some, and Shapiro has responded to points raised by his critics. Shapiro maintains that many genome changes that occur naturally operate by similar molecular DNA rearrangements to those applied intentionally by scientists using genetic engineering techniques developed over the last few decades. For example,
transposable elements A transposable element (TE, transposon, or jumping gene) is a nucleic acid sequence in DNA that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell's genetic identity and genome size. Transpo ...
may be amplified and moved to different locations in the genome. These DNA changes have been found to result in distributed genomic networks for the execution of a wide range of complex traits in fungi, diatoms, plants and animals, such as flower development, the vertebrate body plan, viviparous reproduction and nervous system development in various mammals.


Awards and honors

Shapiro was elected to
Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...
in 1963 and was a
Marshall Scholar The Marshall Scholarship is a postgraduate scholarship for "intellectually distinguished young Americans ndtheir country's future leaders" to study at any university in the United Kingdom. It is widely considered one of the most prestigious sc ...
from 1964 to 1966. He won the Darwin Prize Visiting Professorship of the
University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...
in 1993. In 1994, he was elected as a
fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...
of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...
for "innovative and creative interpretations of bacterial genetics and growth, especially the action of mobile genetic elements and the formation of bacterial colonies." And in 2001, he was made an honorary officer of the
Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established ...
for his service to the Marshall Scholarship program. In 2014 he was chosen to give the 3rd annual "Nobel Prize Laureate - Robert G. Edwards" lecture World Congress on Controversies in Obstetrics, Gynecology & Infertility (COGI)
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Selected publications

Shapiro edited the books ''Mobile Genetic Elements'' (Academic Press, 1983) and, with Martin Dworkin, ''Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms'' (Oxford University Press, 1997). He is the author of ''Evolution: A View from the 21st Century'' (FT Press Science, 2011, ). In 2014, with Raju Pookottil and
Denis Noble Denis Noble (born 16 November 1936) is a British biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Phy ...
, he launche
The Third Way
web site. In 2022 Shapiro published a greatly expanded and updated second edition of ''Evolution: A View from the 21st Century'' (Cognition Press, ).


References


External links


Personal website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Shapiro, James A. 1943 births Harvard College alumni Alumni of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University of Chicago faculty Living people 21st-century American biochemists Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Non-Darwinian evolution