Events at Reed

Mark S. Ptashne is the recipient of this year's Thomas Lamb Eliot Award, recognizing distinguished and sustained achievement by a Reed College graduate.

Mark Ptashne is the Ludwig Professor of Molecular Biology at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York. He received his PhD from Harvard University and was a faculty member at that institution from 1968 to 1997. He has studied how proteins bind DNA and activate or repress transcription, beginning with phage lambda and then turning to eukaryotes, particularly yeast. He has written two books on this subject: A Genetic Switch (Cell Press and Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1992) and, with Alex Gann, Genes and Signals (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2002). Ptashne received the Lasker award for Basic Research in 1997 (considered second only to a Nobel Prize).