Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
F. William Studier was born in 1936 in Waverly, Iowa and went to Yale (BS, Biophysics, 1958), Caltech (PhD, Biophysics, 1963), and Stanford University for postdoctoral research in biochemistry. In 1964 he joined the biology department in Brookhaven National Laboratory, which he chaired from 1990-1999, becoming Senior Biophysicist Emeritus in 2015.
Initially, Dr. Studier studied homogeneous single- and double-stranded DNAs under many different conditions, and then focused on molecular genetics and physiology of bacteriophage T7. Proteins and RNAs were identified by SDS polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and enhanced by a slab-gel apparatus he designed in order to analyze up to 25 adjacent samples. The entire 39,937 base-pair sequence of T7 DNA and locations of T7 genetic elements were determined in collaboration with his Brookhaven colleague, the late John Dunn. T7 RNA polymerase is highly selective for its own promoters, not found in E. coli, and makes complete RNA from almost any DNA about five times faster than E. coli RNA polymerase. This allowed development of the T7 expression system, which produces almost any protein from a multicopy vector. Later Dr. Studier compared sequenced E. coli genomes for insights into bacterial evolution.
Dr. Studier is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the National Academy of the Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He holds 16 patents, nine of which have been licensed and commercialized.