Miroslav Radman

Biography

Radman was born in Split, Croatia. From 1962-1967 he studied experimental biology, physical chemistry and molecular biology at the University of Zagreb and in 1969 he obtained a doctorate degree in molecular biology at the Free University of Brussels. He spent the next three years at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher. From 1973 until 1983 he was Professor of Molecular Biology at the Free University of Brussels and from 1983 until 1998 the Research Director at the French Centre for Scientific Research at the University of Paris 7. He is now a professor of cellular biology at the Faculté de Médecine - Necker, Université Paris V, Paris, France. In 2002 he became a full member of the French Academy of Sciences, the first Croat to do so in the Academy's history. Radman is a co-founder of the Mediterranean Institute For Life Sciences located in Split, Croatia.

Scientific work

Radman's specialty is DNA repair. He and Evelyn M. Witkin set basis for the discovery of SOS response. The SOS response hypothesis was put forward by Radman in 1970 in an unpublished letter sent to various researchers which was published in 1974.

With his group he demonstrated the molecular mechanism of speciation by showing that DNA mismatch repair mechanism prevents recombination between similar chromosomes which leads to establishment of genetic barriers between species.

In 2011 Radman won the FEMS-Lwoff Award, given out by the Federation of European Microbiological Societies, for his research of DNA repair mechanism in Deinococcus radiodurans. He clarified the molecular mechanism that allows Deinococcus radiodurans to repair its fatally damaged DNA.

Radman developed a methodology which enables direct visualization of horizontal gene transfer.

Awards and memberships