Jasper Rine

Jasper Rine is a biologist specialized in the yeast genome.

Biography

He is currently the "Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Genetics and Development" at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, Rine was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006, Rine was named one of 21 HHMI professors receiving $1 million for the purpose of innovating and improving undergraduate curriculum. [ [http://www.hhmi.org/research/professors/rine_bio.html HHMI Scientist Bio: Jasper Rine, Ph.D ] ] He was elected to the National Academies of Sciences in 2008. [http://www.nasonline.org/site/Dir/1004451892?pg=vprof&mbr=1012130&returl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nasonline.org%2Fsite%2FDir%2F1004451892%3Fpg%3Dsrch%26view%3Dbasic&retmk=search_again_link NAS member page]

Rine received his B.S. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1975 and his Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the University of Oregon in 1979. He then joined the Berkeley faculty in 1982. He is also former director of the [http://www-hgc.lbl.gov/ Human Genome Center] at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, an honorific leadership group of the American Society for Microbiology. Dr. Rine is also one of the organizers of the Dog Genome Project.

He has founded several startups, including Acacia Biosciences (now part of Merck & Co.). He is usually considered to be very close to biotech firms, which has led other scholars to question his possible conflicts of interest.

Ignacio Chapela tenure scandal

Rine was the person credited with denying Ignacio Chapela tenure at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 (Chapela has subsequently been rewarded tenure). Rine, the sole biologist on the tenure committee, was determined to have had a conflict of interest because he was at the same time both a servant of the university and the CEO of a private biotech firm. It was argued that Rine should have recused himself from the tenure case of a colleague who had become a public figure not only by discovering the transgenic contamination of the landraces of Mexican maize but by contesting the propriety of the privatization of public research at UC - specifically the contract between the College of Natural Resources and the Novartis Corporation, to which Rine was party. [ [http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/05/21_chapela.shtml For controversial biology researcher Ignacio Chapela, the long and winding road ends with tenure at Berkeley.] ]

tolen laptop

In April 2005, Rine's laptop was stolen from a lecture hall at UC Berkeley. He appeared a week later in the same lecture hall to warn the thief, purportedly a student and assumed to be a "young man", that the hard-drive contained important data - trade secrets, details of a one-hundred million dollar trial, sensitive business information from a pre-public company planning an IPO - for which the thief would be pursued and prosecuted by US federal authorities. Rine gave a deadline to return the computer warning that the student's academic career was over and that, "I'm the only hope you've got of staying out of deeper trouble than you or any other student that I have ever known has ever been in." Later the university press office admitted that Rine's threats were "exaggerated." The deadline passed without the return of the computer or the purported stolen data. [ [http://www3.youtube.com/watch?v=BqPPSlYUBeE Rine's warning video to the laptop thief] ] Rine was widely mocked in the blogosphere for exaggerating the legal threats to the student, and advanced technology being employed in the investigation.

Notes and references

External links

* [http://mcb.berkeley.edu/faculty/GEN/rinej.html Professor Rine's website]
* A [http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040802/pf/430598a_pf.html discussion] in Nature of a case involving a possible conflict of interest
* The [http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=11419 same case] in the Daily Californian, the student newspaper of the UC Berkeley
* [http://mendel.berkeley.edu/dog/manifesto.html The Dog Genome Project - Principles and Goals] by Jasper Rine
* The UK-based Inquirer reports on the truth behind Rine's [http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22762 stolen laptop story]