Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

David Hogness Dies

David Hogness, a biochemist whose work combined molecular biology and genetics, has died, according to Stanford University. He was 94.

"Hogness conceived of and conducted an influential series of experiments in the 1970s and 1980s that bridged the gap between molecular biology and genetics, and that played a key role in launching the fields of molecular genetics and genomics," a statement from Stanford says.

It adds that Hogness found that the genes of higher organisms contain intervening sequences or introns, that genes' activity is regulated by noncoding promoter regions, and identified the TATA box that indicates the start sequence for gene transcription. He also studied Ultrabithorax, a key Drosophila development gene, to find that particular combinations of mutations in it led to flies with duplicated body segments, and, according to Stanford, published a paper in the early 1980s describing his positional cloning of the Ultrabithorax gene. Hogness joined the university in 1959.

"This paper demonstrated the ability to clone the gene underlying any genetic trait, and simultaneously proved there were genes specifically devoted to regulating normal development. It's one of the great papers in the history of biology," says Rockefeller University President Richard Lifton, who studied under Hogness, in a statement.