The Houston-based Welch Foundation, which gives an annual $300,000 award that usually recognizes the lifetime achievements of a U.S. chemist, decided this year to honor a Frenchman: Pierre Chambon of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Strasbourg.
Chambon
Chambon, who was awarded last week, "has been at the forefront" in much of molecular biology, says molecular biologist Steve McKnight of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. "Every time this field has made a big step forward, he was right there." During his 40-year career, Chambon was the first to show that eukaryotic cells use three enzymes to transcribe DNA into RNA, while bacteria use just one. He was among the first to recognize that eukaryotic genes have noncoding regions, called introns. His team is best known for its discovery of steroid nuclear receptors, which act with steroids such as estrogen and progesterone to regulate gene expression.
Chambon now studies how retinoic acid controls cell function and differentiation. "It's a way of bridging structural biology and biochemistry with developmental biology," he says. Until recently, "this was a total unknown. But now we've learned so much that we can make a good guess at how [genes] work."
The Welch Foundation was established in 1954 by oil man Robert Alonzo Welch and has given this award since 1972.
