Oral Histories

Interview of Mark D. Biggin

Subtitle:
Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences: Mark D. Biggin
Series:
Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences
Topic:
Science, Medicine, and Technology
Interviewer:
Meldrum, Marcia L.
Interviewee:
Biggin, Mark D.
Supporting Documents:
Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research.
Language:
English
Copyright:
Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library.
Series Statement:
Interviews in this series, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, document the research of "outstanding scientists from quality institutions" chosen by the Pew Scholars Program to receive four-year stipends.
Abstract:
Childhood and schooling in Chesterfield, England; accepted into the Bart Barrell lab at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University; interest in transcriptional regulation leads to a postdoc in the Robert Tjian lab at the University of California, Berkeley; factors that led Biggin to focus his research on even-skipped (eve); starts up lab at Yale University with a dual focus on zeste, GAGA, and NTF, and on homeodomain proteins; science funding in the United States compared to England; researching how eve represses transcription of the Ubx promoter in vitro; Biggin's lab's work on how eve and fushi-taruzu (ftz) bind DNA in vivo; the question of how homeodomain proteins interact in the cell; the question of whether gene regulation is direct; experimental work on the role of redundancy in regulatory interactions; the National Institutes of Health grant application process; the pressure to produce results for grant renewal; the "no rules" rule of scientific discovery.