James Alan Shapiro

James A. Shapiro is Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. in English Literature from Harvard in 1964 and his Ph.D. in Genetics from Cambridge University in 1968. William Hayes was his PhD supervisor, and Sydney Brenner was an unofficial adviser during his time in Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. His thesis, The Structure of the Galactose Operon in Escherichia coli K12, contains the first suggestion of transposable elements in bacteria. He confirmed this hypothesis in 1968 during his postdoctoral tenure as a Jane Coffin Childs fellow in the laboratory of Francois Jacob at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The following year, as an American Cancer Society fellow in Jonathan Beckwith’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School, he and his colleagues used in vivo genetic manipulations to clone and purify the lac operon of E. coli, an accomplishment that received international attention. In 1979, he formulated the first precise molecular model for transposition and replication of phage Mu and other transposons. In 1984, he published the first example of what is now called “adaptive mutation.” He found that selection stress triggers a tremendous increase in the frequency of Mu-mediated fusions. Together with Pat Higgins in 1989, he showed that activation of Mu replication and transposition is spatially organized in bacterial colonies. Since 1992, he has been writing about the importance of biologically regulated natural genetic engineering as a fundamental new concept in evolution science. Following a teaching stint at the University of Havana (1970-1972) and research at Brandeis (1972-1973), Shapiro moved to a faculty position at the University of Chicago in 1973. He has been there since then with occasional sabbaticals and visiting professor appointments at the Institut Pasteur, Tel Aviv University, Cambridge University, and the University of Edinburgh, where he was the Darwin Prize Visiting Professor in 1993. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the AAAS and the Linnean Society of London. In 2001, he received an honorary O.B.E. from Queen Elizabeth for services to higher education in the UK and US. Together with Ahmed Bukhari and Sankhar Adhya, Shapiro organized the first conference on DNA insertion elements in May 1976 at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory. From 1980 until her death in 1992, he maintained a close scientific and personal friendship with Barbara McClintock, whom he credits with opening his eyes to new ways of thinking about science in general and evolution in particular. Shapiro is a founding member of the web site, www.TheThirdWayofEvolution.com, intended to make the public aware of scientific alternatives to both Intelligent Design and Neo-Darwinism. He has published pioneering books on mobile genetic elements, natural genetic engineering, bacterial multicellularity, and read-write genome evolution. For more information, visit: http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu.