Marc W. Kirschner, Ph.D.
RECIPIENT OF THE HONORARY DEGREE
Marc Kirschner majored in chemistry at Northwestern University and earned his doctorate in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, studying allosteric proteins. He continued at Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow in John Gerhart’s lab, and he became captivated by the cell cycle.
In 1972, Dr. Kirschner joined the Princeton University department of biochemical sciences, where he launched a research program on microtubules, the long polymers that compose the mitotic spindle, and made several major advances. For example, he discovered the first microtubule-assembly protein, tau, which is now known for its association with Alzheimer’s disease and related neurological disorders.
Dr. Kirschner moved to the University of California, San Francisco, in 1978, and continued his work on the cytoskeleton. He demonstrated that some microtubules grow while others shrink and elucidated the role of GTP in this process of dynamic instability. At UCSF, he also explored development and the cell cycle, and he made numerous seminal findings in those fields. He and Dr. Gerhart showed how frog eggs establish dorsal-ventral polarity and they found an autonomous oscillator called Maturation Promoting Factor, whose quantities rise and fall in synchrony with the normal cell division cycle even if cleavage is blocked. These observations led to Dr. Kirschner’s discovery of the Anaphase Promoting Complex, which governs the cell cycle by destroying cyclin and other regulators through the ubiquitin system.
In 1993, Harvard University recruited Dr. Kirschner to set up its cell biology department and, a decade later, he became the founding chair of the department of systems biology. He is currently the John Franklin Enders University Professor at Harvard Medical School.
Drs. Kirschner and Gerhart co-authored two books about the cellular basis for evolutionary change, Cells, Embryos, and Evolution and The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. Dr. Kirschner is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. His many honors include the Gairdner Foundation International Award (Canada), the American Society for Cell Biology’s Public Service Award, the Dickson Prize for Science, and the E.B. Wilson Award.