Prof. Werner Arber
Roots, Promotion and Impact of Technological Innovation
1978 Nobel Laureate in Medicine
University of Basel, Switzerland
Prof. Werner Arber's discovery of an enzyme that could cleave long strands of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) led to a revolution in genetics research, providing the foundation that led to techniques to separate and reassemble basic genetic material. Gene splicing proved invaluable for DNA sequencing and gene mapping, which focuses on genetic organization. Prof. Werner Arber received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his research on gene splicing.
Prof. Werner Arber obtained his academic education in natural sciences at the ETH in Zürich and at the University of Geneva. He was taking a full professorship for molecular microbiology at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and retired in 1996. His scientific activities concern microbial genetics, molecular genetics and biotechnology and more specifically, bacteriophage genetics and lysogeny, phage-mediated transduction, bacterial restriction and modification systems, site-specific recombination, transposition of mobile genetic elements, molecular mechanisms of genetic variation and molecular evolution.
He also received several honorary doctoral degrees and he is either member or honorary member of a number of scientific academies and societies, such as EMBO, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europea, the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology, the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the Spanish Academy of Engineering, the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences, the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences.
Prof. Werner Arber also devoted part of his activities to national and international science politics. Among others, he was for 11 years member and vice-president of the Swiss Science Council. From 1996 to 1999 he was president of the International Council for Science (ICSU). In all of his activities he promoted broad interdisciplinary collaboration on the basis of scientific excellence of the involved partners.
Updated on November 12, 2007