Lubert Stryer (born March 2, 1938, in

Tianjin Tianjin (; ; Mandarin: ), alternately romanized as Tientsin (), is a municipality and a coastal metropolis in Northern China on the shore of the Bohai Sea. It is one of the nine national central cities in Mainland China, with a total popu ...

, China) is the Emeritus Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of

Cell Biology Cell biology (also cellular biology or cytology) is a branch of biology that studies the structure, function, and behavior of cells. All living organisms are made of cells. A cell is the basic unit of life that is responsible for the living an ...

, at

Stanford University School of Medicine Stanford University School of Medicine is the medical school of Stanford University and is located in Stanford, California. It traces its roots to the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific, founded in San Francisco in 1858. This ...

. His research over more than four decades has been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2007 he received the

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 ...

from President Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high density

microarray A microarray is a multiplex lab-on-a-chip. Its purpose is to simultaneously detect the expression of thousands of genes from a sample (e.g. from a tissue). It is a two-dimensional array on a solid substrate—usually a glass slide or silicon ...

s for genetic analysis, and authoring the standard undergraduate biochemistry textbook, ''

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 ...

''. It is now in its ninth edition and also edited by Jeremy Berg, John L. Tymoczko and Gregory J. Gatto, Jr. Stryer received his B.S. degree from 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 ...

in 1957 and his M.D. degree from

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 cons ...

. He was a

Helen Hay Whitney Helen Julia Hay Whitney (March 11, 1875 – September 24, 1944) was an American poet, writer, racehorse owner/breeder, socialite, and philanthropist. She was a member by marriage of the prominent Whitney family of New York. Early life She was t ...

Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at Harvard and then at the

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) is a research institute in Cambridge, England, involved in the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s. Since then it has remained a major medical ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, England, before joining the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...

in 1963. In 1969 he moved to

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

to become Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and in 1976, he returned to Stanford to head a new Department of Structural Biology.

Research profile

Stryer and coworkers pioneered the use of fluorescence spectroscopy, particularly

Förster resonance energy transfer Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET), fluorescence resonance energy transfer, resonance energy transfer (RET) or electronic energy transfer (EET) is a mechanism describing energy transfer between two light-sensitive molecules (chromophores). ...

(FRET), to monitor the structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules. In 1967, Stryer and Haugland showed that the efficiency of energy transfer depends on the inverse sixth power of the distance between the donor and acceptor, as predicted by Förster's theory. They proposed that energy transfer can serve as a spectroscopic ruler to reveal proximity relationships in biological macromolecules. A second contribution was Stryer's discovery of the primary stage of amplification in visual excitation. Stryer, together with Fung and Hurley, showed that a single photoexcited rhodopsin molecule activates many molecules of transducin, which in turn activate many molecules of a cyclic GMP phosphodiesterase. Stryer's laboratory has also contributed to our understanding of the role of calcium in visual recovery and adaptation. Stryer participated in developing light-directed, spatially addressable parallel chemical synthesis for the synthesis of peptides and polynucleotides. Light-directed combinatorial synthesis has been used by

Stephen Fodor Stephen P. A. "Steve" Fodor (born in Seattle, Washington in 1953) is a scientist and businessman in the field of DNA microarray technology. He is the co-founder of Affymetrix, a company that produces DNA microarrays to screen gene expression and ...

and coworkers at

Affymetrix Affymetrix is now Applied Biosystems, a brand of DNA microarray products sold by Thermo Fisher Scientific that originated with an American biotechnology research and development and manufacturing company of the same name. The Santa Clara, Cali ...

to make DNA arrays containing millions of different sequences for genetic analyses. Since 1975, Stryer has authored nine editions of the textbook ''Biochemistry''. Stryer also chaired a National Research Council committee that produced a report entitled ''Bio2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists''.

Honors

*American Chemical Society Award in Biological Chemistry (

Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry The Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry was established in 1934. Consisting of a bronze medal and honorarium, its purpose is to stimulate fundamental research in biological chemistry by scientists not over thirty-eight years of age. The Award i ...

, 1970) *

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

(elected 1975) *

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 Nat ...

(elected 1984) *

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 ...

Newcomb Cleveland Prize (1992) *Honorary Doctor of Science degree, University of Chicago, 1992 *Molecular Bioanalytics Award, German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 2002 *

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

(2006) *

European Inventor of the Year The European Inventor Award(formerly European Inventor of the Year Award, renamed in 2010), are presented annually by the European Patent Office, sometimes supported by the respective Presidency of the Council of the European Union and by the Euro ...

2006 in the category "Small and medium-sized enterprises"

Notable students

* Richard P. Haugland (Ph.D. 1970), founder of Molecular Probes, Inc. *Richard A. Mathies (postdoc), Dean of the College of Chemistry,

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, *Tobias Meyer (postdoc), now Professor, Department of Chemical and Systems Biology, Stanford University *Cheng-Wen Wu (postdoc), former founding president of the Taiwan National Health Research Institutes, 1996-2005, now Professor at the Taiwan Medical College. * Jeremy M. Berg, co-author of widely used ''

'' textbook

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stryer, Lubert 1938 births Living people Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences American biochemists Harvard Medical School alumni University of Chicago alumni National Medal of Science laureates Yale University faculty Stanford University School of Medicine faculty European Inventor Award winners Members of the American Philosophical Society