Werner Arber

Werner Arber is a Swiss microbiologist and molecular geneticist, born on 3 June 1929 in Gränichen in the Canton of Aargau, Switzerland. He studied natural sciences at the Swiss Polytechnical School in Zurich, then took an assistantship in electron microscopy at the Biophysics Laboratory of the University of Geneva, where work on the bacteriophage lambda became the subject of his doctoral thesis. He showed that lambda-mediated transduction rests on substitution mutants in which bacterial genes replace part of the phage genome. After a period in Los Angeles with Joe Bertani he returned to Geneva in 1960 and investigated how bacterial strains restrict the growth of phages. With Daisy Dussoix he reported in 1961 that restriction and modification act directly on DNA and are properties of the bacterial strain, and later work showed that modification is brought about by methylation. He became extraordinary professor of molecular genetics at Geneva in 1965, moved to the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, and turned to insertion elements and transposons. He received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Daniel Nathans and Hamilton O. Smith.