James A Shapiro

Academic biography

Shapiro obtained his Bachelor's degree in English from Harvard College in 1964. Then, inspired by a genetics course he had taken as a senior, he shifted from English to science, earned a doctorate in genetics from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1968, and did postdoctoral research with Jon Beckwith at the Harvard Medical School. He was troubled by the potential genetic engineering applications of his research. He spent two years teaching genetics in Havana, Cuba, before returning to another postdoctorate with Harlyn Halvorson at Brandeis University. Since 1973, he has worked as a professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago, and has also been a visiting professor from time to time, including once as a Darwin Prize Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh in 1994.

Research

While working with Beckwith at Harvard, Shapiro was part of the first team to isolate a single gene from an organism. The gene they isolated was lacZ, which codes for the β-galactosidase enzyme used by E. coli bacteria to digest the sugars in milk. Their technique involved transduction of two complementary copies of the gene into two different bacteriophages, then mixing the genetic material from the two phages, and finally using a nuclease to degrade the single-stranded phage genome, leaving only the double-stranded DNA formed by the two copies.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1979, Shapiro was the first to propose replicative transposition as a mechanism for gene mobility. In this model, genes such as retrotransposons are copied from one DNA sequence to another via a process in which the two sequences combine to form an intermediate "theta" shape, sometimes called a "Shapiro intermediate".

Later, Shapiro showed that bacteria cooperate in communities that exhibit complex behavior such as hunting, building protective structures, and spreading spores, and in which individual bacteria may sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the larger community. Based on this work, Shapiro believes that cooperative behavior is a fundamental organizing concept for biological activity at all levels of complexity.

Shapiro has also studied pattern formation in bacteria, an area where he feels that there are new mathematical principles to be discovered that also underlie the growth of crystals and the shape of cosmological structures. For instance, he found that the gut bacterium Proteus mirabilis forms complex terraced rings, an emergent property of simple rules that the bacterium uses to avoid neighboring cells.

He has proposed the term natural genetic engineering to account for how novelty is created in the course of biological evolution. It has been criticized by some. His work is also widely supported.

Awards and honors

Shapiro was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1963 and was a Marshall Scholar from 1964 to 1966. He won the Darwin Prize Visiting Professorship of the University of Edinburgh in 1993. In 1994, he was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for "innovative and creative interpretations of bacterial genetics and growth, especially the action of mobile genetic elements and the formation of bacterial colonies." And in 2001, he was made an honorary officer of the Order of the British Empire for his service to the Marshall Scholarship program. In 2014 he was chosen to give the 3rd annual "Nobel Prize Laureate - Robert G. Edwards" lecture

Selected publications

Shapiro edited the books Mobile Genetic Elements (Academic Press, 1983) and, with Martin Dworkin, Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms (Oxford University Press, 1997). He is the author of Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (FT Press Science, 2011, ISBN 978-0-13-278093-3).