The Biology of Genomes (2008) with George Weinstock Interviewed by Orli Bahcall

George Weinstock, Ph.D. joined The Genome Center at Washington University in 2008 where he is Associate Director and... » More

George Weinstock, Ph.D. joined The Genome Center at Washington University in 2008 where he is Associate Director and Professor of Genetics. Previously, he was involved in building one of three NIH-funded large-scale Genome Centers (Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center, HGSC) and subsequent sequencing of the Human Genome. He was a leader in other HGSC genome projects: the rat, mouse, cow, macaque, marmoset, orangutan, dolphin, wallaby, sea urchin, honey bee, beetle, wasp, acorn worm, Drosophila melanogaster and pseudoobscura, Dictyostelium discoideum, Ascosphaera apis, and Acanthamoeba among others. In addition he continued to sequence bacterial genomes of interest in infectious diseases and evolutionary studies including Treponema pallidum (syphilis) and the periodontal pathogens Fusobacterium nucleatum and Treponema denticola. Most recently he has worked on studying the human microbiome: the collection of microbes that colonize the human body. The goal of this work is to analyze the genomes of these organisms, characterize the communities that they form, and measure how these change with different health and disease states. Dr. Weinstock received a B.S. from the Univ. Michigan (Biophysics, 1970), a Ph.D. from MIT (Microbiology, 1977) and did his postdoctoral research at Stanford Univ. Medical School (Biochemistry Department). In 1980, he joined the NCI-Frederick Cancer Research Facility and established the DNA Metabolism Section, Laboratory of Recombinant DNA. In 1984, he moved to The Univ. Texas-Houston Health Science Center (Dept. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 1984-95; Dept. Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, 1995-2001). In 1998, he joined the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center as Co-Director and became a tenured Professor in the Molecular and Human Genetics Department in 2001.



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