Rudolf Jaenisch

Rudolf Jaenisch (born 22 April 1942) is a Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is a pioneer of transgenic science, in which an animal’s genetic makeup is altered. Jaenisch has focused on creating genetically modified mice to study cancer and neurological diseases

Career

Jaenisch received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Munich in 1967, preferring the laboratory to the clinic. He became a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, studying bacteriophages. He left Germany in 1970 for research positions at Princeton University, Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research and the Salk Institute. He returned to Germany in 1977 to become the head of the Department of Tumor Virology at the Heinrich Pette Institute at the University of Hamburg. He arrived at MIT in 1984. He participated in the 2005 science conference on human cloning at the United Nations and serves on the science advisory boards of the Genetics Policy Institute and Stemgent.

Biography of Rudolf Jaenisch, (PNAS 101(39) 11982-4)

Awards and honours

• 2001, inaugural Genetics Prize of the Gruber Foundation
• 2003 Election as a member of U.S. National Academy of Sciences
• 2006 Max Delbrück Medal
• 2007 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science
• 2009 Ernst Schering Prize
• 2010 National Medal of Science
• 2011 Wolf Prize in Medicine
• 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science from the Franklin Institute
• 2014 Otto Warburg Medal