Office of Public Information Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 (212) 854-5573
James L. Manley, a molecular biologist who is bringing to light the intricate ways genetic information is expressed to create living tissue, has been named Julian Clarence Levi Professor of the Life Sciences at Columbia University. He is Chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences.
He has researched how genetic information is transmitted from DNA, which tells the cell how to form, to RNA, which takes that information to the cell. The RNA molecules, known as messenger RNA or mRNA, are created when chains of nucleotides are copied from one unzipped half of the DNA double helix. They carry the genetic code in their pattern of nucleotides from the cell's nucleus to cellular structures known as ribosomes, where the proteins that are cellular building blocks are synthesized. This transfer of genetic information from DNA to mRNA is called transcription, but the entire process, in which inherited traits carried by genes are replicated in new living tissue, is known as gene expression.
Professor Manley has studied several aspects of the process, including how and why mRNA molecules are created at certain times and not others, and how introns, portions of the RNA chains that code no known genetic information, are spliced out during production of the mRNA. These activities in the nucleus of the cell require a number of complex proteins, such as the enzyme RNA polymerase, which assembles the nucleotide chains from the right spot on the DNA template. Professor Manley's goal has been to identify and isolate these factors and then to understand how they can be controlled to regulate gene expression.
Born in Minneapolis, Professor Manley received the B.S. degree in biology from Columbia and the Ph.D. in molecular biology from from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Professor Manley conducted his doctoral research at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1977 to 1980.
He joined the Columbia faculty in 1980 as assistant professor of biological sciences and was named professor in 1987. He was a member of the American Cancer Society's Microbiology and Virology Committee from 1988 to 1991 and of the National Institutes of Health's Molecular Biology Study Section from 1989 to 1993. The Columbia biologist has served on the editorial boards of a number of refereed journals and since 1991 has been associate editor of Gene Expression. He lists 140 journal publications.
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