Walter Jakob Gehring

Walter Jakob Gehring (born March 20, 1939 in Zurich) is Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Zurich in 1965 and after two years as a research assistant of Professor Ernst Hadorn he joined Professor Alan Garen's group at Yale University in New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow.

In 1969 he was appointed as an associate professor at the Yale Medical School and 1972 he returned to Switzerland to become a professor of developmental biology and genetics at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. He is Secretary General of the European Molecular Biology Organization, President of the International Society for Developmental Biologists, a Foreign Member of the National Academy of the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany and Sweden. In 2000 he received the "Kyoto Prize for Basic Science". In 2002 he received the Balzan Prize for Developmental Biology.

Walter Gehring has mainly been involved in studies of Drosophila genetics and development, particularly in the analysis of cell determination in the embryo and transdetermination of imaginal discs. He has made significant contributions to the study of the heat shock genes, various transposons and the homeotic genes which are involved in the genetic control of development.

He and his group have discovered the homeobox, a DNA segment characteristic for homeotic genes which is not only present in arthropods and their ancestors, but also in vertebrates including man. He has been involved in the development and application of enhancer trapping methods. He and his collaborators have identified PAX6 as a master control gene for eye development, which led to a new theory about the monophyletic origin of the eyes in evolution.

Further reading

* Niklaus Walter: "From Transdetermination to the Homeodomain at Atomic Resolution: An interview with Walter J. Gehring", Int. J. Dev. Biol. 46: 29-37 (2002)