Walter Jakob Gehring (20 March 1939 – 29 May 2014) was a Swiss developmental biologist who was a professor at the Biozentrum Basel of the

University of Basel The University of Basel (Latin: ''Universitas Basiliensis'', German: ''Universität Basel'') is a university in Basel, Switzerland. Founded on 4 April 1460, it is Switzerland's oldest university and among the world's oldest surviving universiti ...

, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD at the University of Zurich in 1965 and after two years as a research assistant of Ernst Hadorn he joined

Alan Garen Alan Garen was an American geneticist who co-discovered suppressor mutations for tRNA. The Garen lab also showed that certain triplet codons (5'-UAG, 5'-UAA, and 5'-UGA) failed to bind amino acids. Thus, the Garen lab and Brenner labs are both c ...

's group at

Yale University 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 w ...

in New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1969 he was appointed associate professor at

Yale Medical School 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 ...

and 1972 returned to Switzerland to become a professor of

developmental biology Developmental biology is the study of the process by which animals and plants grow and develop. Developmental biology also encompasses the biology of regeneration, asexual reproduction, metamorphosis, and the growth and differentiation of st ...

and

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 work ...

at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. He was Secretary General of the

European Molecular Biology Organization The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) is a professional, non-profit organization of more than 1,800 life scientists. Its goal is to promote research in life science and enable international exchange between scientists. It co-funds cour ...

, President of the

International Society of Developmental Biologists The International Society of Developmental Biologists (ISDB), formerly the Institut Internationale d'Embryologie (IIE), is a non-profit scientific association promoting developmental biology. The society holds an international Congress every four y ...

, and Foreign Member of the national academies of the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany and Sweden. Gehring was mainly involved in studies of

Drosophila ''Drosophila'' () is a genus of flies, belonging to the family Drosophilidae, whose members are often called "small fruit flies" or (less frequently) pomace flies, vinegar flies, or wine flies, a reference to the characteristic of many speci ...

genetics and development, particularly in the analysis of

cell determination Within the field of developmental biology, one goal is to understand how a particular cell develops into a final cell type, known as fate determination. Within an embryo, several processes play out at the cellular and tissue level to create an organ ...

in the

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 spe ...

and transdetermination of

imaginal disc An imaginal disc is one of the parts of a holometabolous insect larva that will become a portion of the outside of the adult insect during the pupal transformation. Contained within the body of the larva, there are pairs of discs that will for ...

s. He performed studies of the heat shock genes, various

transposon 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. Tra ...

s, and the

homeotic gene In evolutionary developmental biology, homeotic genes are genes which regulate the development of anatomical structures in various organisms such as echinoderms, insects, mammals, and plants. Homeotic genes often encode transcription factor proteins ...

s which are involved in the genetic control of development. In 1983 Gehring and his collaborators ( William McGinnis,

Michael S. Levine Michael Levine is an American developmental and cell biologist at Princeton University, where he is the Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and a Professor of Molecular Biology. Levine previously held appointments at ...

, Ernst Hafen, Richard Garber, Atsushi Kuroiwa, Johannes Wirz), discovered the

homeobox A homeobox is a DNA sequence, around 180 base pairs long, that regulates large-scale anatomical features in the early stages of embryonic development. For instance, mutations in a homeobox may change large-scale anatomical features of the full-g ...

, a DNA segment characteristic for homeotic genes which is not only present in

arthropod Arthropods (, (gen. ποδός)) are invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and paired jointed appendages. Arthropods form the phylum Arthropoda. They are distinguished by their jointed limbs and cuticle made of chiti ...

s and their ancestors, but also in

vertebrate Vertebrates () comprise all animal taxa within the subphylum Vertebrata () ( chordates with backbones), including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Vertebrates represent the overwhelming majority of the phylum Chordata, with ...

s including man. Gehring was also involved in the development and application of enhancer trapping methods. He and his collaborators identified

PAX6 Paired box protein Pax-6, also known as aniridia type II protein (AN2) or oculorhombin, is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''PAX6'' gene. Function PAX6 is a member of the Pax gene family which is responsible for carrying the gene ...

as a master control gene for eye development, which led to a new theory about the monophyletic origin of the eyes in evolution.

Awards

* 1987

Gairdner Foundation International Award The Canada Gairdner International Award is given annually by the Gairdner Foundation at a special dinner to five individuals for outstanding discoveries or contributions to medical science. Receipt of the Gairdner is traditionally considered a ...

* 1987

Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine Established in 1986, the Louis-Jeantet Prizes are funded by the ''Fondation Louis-Jeantet'' and awarded each year to experienced researchers who have distinguished themselves in the field of biomedical research in one of the member states of t ...

* 1996 Awarded the Otto Warburg Medal * 1997 Awarded the

March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology The March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology is awarded once a year by the March of Dimes. It carries a $250,000 award "to an investigator whose research brings us closer to the day when all babies will be born healthy." It also includes a ...

. * 2000 Received the

Kyoto Prize The is Japan's highest private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences. It is given not only to those that are top representatives of their own respective fields, but to "those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, ...

for Basic Science. * 2001 Alfred Vogt-Preis * 2002 Received the

Balzan Prize The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four annual monetary prizes to people or organizations who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, culture, as well as for endeavours for peace and the br ...

for Developmental Biology. * 2003

A.O. Kovalevsky Medal The A.O. Kovalevsky Medal, awarded annually by the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists for extraordinary achievements in evolutionary developmental biology and comparative zoology, is named after the noted Russian embryologist Alexander Kovalevsk ...

Awards

References

Further reading