Benjamin D. Hall
University of Washington
December 9, 1932 - April 2, 2019
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Scientific Discipline: Genetics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2014)
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Benjamin Hall graduated from the University of Kansas in 1954, majoring in Chemistry. He then completed graduate studies at Harvard University, receiving a doctoral degree in Biophysical Chemistry in 1958. His thesis research described and named the two major RNAs (18S and 28S) of the ribosome. During his initial faculty appointment at the University of Illinois (1958-63) he initiated physical studies of the RNA molecules made in T-even phage-infected E. coli and devised specific molecular hybridization techniques that showed these RNAs to be complementary in sequence to the bacteriophage DNA. In 1963 He moved to the Department of Genetics at the University of Washington where he developed a research program directed toward understanding transcription by RNA Polymerases II and III in the yeast S. cerevisiae. This culminated in 1981 in two inventions that established Saccharomyces as the organism of choice for the production of vaccines (against Hepatitis B and Human Papilloma viruses) and other proteins of pharmaceutical interest, among them, insulin. Since 1995, Professor Hall studied the molecular systematics of fungi and of flowering plants, initially using the sequences of moderately conserved proteins of the transcription apparatus as an evolutionary metric. Most recently, Hall’s laboratory, in collaboration with Prof. Jay Shendure’s group, decoded the genome of the Rhododendron species R. williamsianum.
