Future: Life Sciences

Prof. Robert H. Waterston earned a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from Princeton University in 1965 and received both a medical degree and a doctorate in pathology from the University of Chicago in 1972.

After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, Prof. Waterston joined the Washington University faculty in 1976.

He was James S. McDonnel Professor of Genetics, head of the Department of Genetics, and director of the School of Medicine’s Genome Sequencing Center, which he founded in 1993. The center was a principal member of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, the public effort to complete the working draft.

He was a recipient of an American Heart Association Established Investigator Award from 1980 to 1985, and held a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship from 1985 to 1986. He has served as a member of several NIH study sections and as chairman of the NIH’s Molecular Cytology Study Section as well as a member of the NIH Advisory Council.

Prof. Waterston is a member of Sigma Xi, Alpha Omega Alpha, the Genetics Society and the American Society of Cell Biology. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles.

“It’s powerful information, and the potential benefits are enormous,” Waterston has said. “We all have a responsibility to educate ourselves about the issues. To realize its great promise, scientific information of this sort must be available in an unrestricted form to citizens and scientists everywhere.”

“For the next hundred years, scientists will use these foundations to make increasingly detailed discoveries about how human beings and other organisms work,” he said of the advances in genetics research. “As a result, more and more will be understood about all aspects of human health, behavior, and disease – and ultimately about therapy and prevention.”