Public release date: 10-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Karin Eskenazi ket2116@columbia.edu 212-342-0508 Columbia University Medical Center

NEW YORK (September 10, 2012) Tom Maniatis, PhD, the Isidore S. Edelman Professor of Biochemistry and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center, is to receive the 2012 Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science. Dr. Maniatis is known for both his research on the mechanisms of gene regulation and his Molecular Cloning Manual. Dr. Maniatis will receive the award on Sept. 21 in New York City.

"I am deeply honored to receive the Lasker Special Achievement Award in Medical Science," said Dr. Maniatis. "I became a scientist because of the excitement of making discoveries, but to see the impact of these discoveries on the treatment of human disease has been particularly gratifying."

"Tom Maniatis' work is the quintessential example of the path from basic science to clinical applications," said Lee Goldman, MD, executive vice president of Columbia University and dean of the faculties of health sciences and medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. "His cloning manual is used by researchers worldwide, while his research contributions are at the foundation of current thinking about genetics."

In 1980 James Watson, PhD, director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), asked Maniatiswho was on the Harvard faculty at the timeto teach new genetic engineering techniques during a summer course at CSHL and then to produce a manual. The resultant Molecular Cloning Manualpublished in 1982 and often referred to as "the Bible" by students and researcherscontained practically every technique biologists needed to manipulate DNA.

Scientists could now identify genes that cause disease and then produce new drugs such as human insulin; and the techniques were indispensable for the success of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Maniatis' laboratory developed many of the techniques in the manual, which he coauthored with his postdoctoral fellow Ed Fritsch, PhD, and Joe Sambrook, PhD, the scientific director at CSHL.

Using the new techniques, Dr. Maniatis was the first to isolate a human gene and to use the cloned gene to identify deletion and substitution mutations that cause disease. The gene beta globin, for example, is part of the hemoglobin complex, and the mutations Dr. Maniatis identified cause a blood disease called beta thalassemia.

Maniatis also created the first complete human "genomic" DNA librarya collection of DNA containing every human genewhich made it possible to isolate and study any human gene. As with his genetic engineering techniques, Maniatis freely shared this library with other researchers.

In other research, Dr. Maniatis and his students uncovered important details of how information in genes is turned into proteins, including the mechanisms of transcription and RNA splicing.

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Dr. Tom Maniatis honored with 2012 Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science