James A. Shapiro

James Alan Shapiro (born May 18, 1943) is an American biologist, an expert in bacterial genetics and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. Shapiro obtained his Bachelor's degree in English from Harvard College in 1964. Then, inspired by a genetics course he had taken as a senior, he shifted from English to science. He was awarded a Marshall scholarship for postgraduate research at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1964 to 1967, spending his final year at Hammersmith hospital under the supervision of William Hayes, and being awarded a PhD in genetics in 1968. His thesis, The Structure of the Galactose Operon in Escherichia coli K12, contains the first suggestion of transposable elements in bacteria. He confirmed this hypothesis in 1968 during his postdoctoral tenure as a Jane Coffin Childs fellow in the laboratory of François Jacob at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. As an American Cancer Society fellow in Jon Beckwith’s laboratory at the Harvard Medical School 1968-70, he and his colleagues used in vivo genetic manipulations to clone and purify the lac operon of E. coli. He was troubled by the potential genetic engineering applications of his research. He served as Invited Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Havana, Cuba 1970-1972, before returning to another postdoctorate with Harlyn Halvorson at Brandeis University. Since 1973, he has worked as a professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago. In 1975 Shapiro attended the ICN-UCLA Squaw Valley Symposium on Bacterial Plasmids, where his interest in DNA restructuring in bacteria was heightened by learning about the movements of antibiotic resistance transposons to new genomic locations. This prompted him to organize, in collaboration with Sankar Adhya and the late Ahmed Bukhari, the first meeting on the topic of DNA insertion elements at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in 1976. Although they expected only a few colleagues, the meeting was attended by over 150 scientists from around the world, including Barbara McClintock.