Jeffrey Glassberg

Jeffrey Glassberg is an American biologist who filed the first known patent on February 28, 1983 covering the identification of people through DNA analysis (DNA fingerprinting)[1][2][3]

Glassberg also founded the North American Butterfly Association (NABA)[4]:22–27[5]:32 and is the leading proponent of moving interest in butterflies from hobbyist collecting and nets to butterflying with binoculars and cameras.[6][7][8]

Life

Early life

Jeffrey Glassberg was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 27, 1947 where his family lived until 1952 when they moved to Long Island, New York. His father established his own company making automobile seat covers and his mother worked there as well. Glassberg's early years were devoted to nature; bird-watching, chasing butterflies,[4]:23 and, with his younger brother, to chemistry experimentation. Moving from the buildings of New York City to a place of forests and meadows on Long Island where his parents allowed him to roam stimulated his interest and love of nature which continues.

Family life

Jeffrey Glassberg met his future wife, Jane Scott, in a seminar course on bacteriophage lamda at Rice University. When he moved to Stanford University School of Medicine in 1972, she accompanied him and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Univ. of California, San Francisco. In 1979 they both moved to Rockefeller University, where she worked on virology in the laboratory of Purnell W. Choppin.

Education and Academic Career

Glassberg was graduated from Tufts University School of Engineering with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1969, but turned to Biology after travels to South America with a colleague to study butterflies. He took summer biology courses and taught high school biology on the North Shore of Long Island, before acceptance into the graduate program at Rice University, Houston, Texas in 1972. Glassberg received his Ph.D. in Biology from Rice University in 1977, working on the genetics of bacteriophage SP01 DNA replication in the laboratory of Charlie Stewart.[9][10][11] He then spent three years in the Biochemistry Department at the Stanford University School of Medicine where he was a post-doctoral fellow in Arthur Kornberg's laboratory doing research on DNA-binding proteins.[12][13][14][15] Glassberg moved to Rockefeller University, New York City in 1979 and worked on creating a genetic system using the eukaryote, Crithidia fasciculata, a trypanosomatid parasite of mosquitos.[16]

Background and Development of DNA Fingerprinting

In May 1981, Glassberg was bird-watching at dawn in Central Park, New York City, and found a woman who had been sexually assaulted. Soon afterward, at lunch at Rockefeller University with his wife and the wife of a colleague, the latter recounted her experience as a member of the jury for a rape case. She related how semen was recovered from the victim but was used only to demonstrate that there had been sexual contact. It was a difficult legal case, as there were no fingerprints or blood for identification.[5]:23 Earlier that month, Michael W. Young, a colleague and assistant professor at Rockefeller University had shown Glassberg the Southern blots of genomes from individual Drosophila fruitflies that had been probed with copia elements. Each individual Drosophila organism showed a different pattern.

Combining these facts, Glassberg stated that if there were tandem repeats in the Drosophila genome that produced unique restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) patterns, then there were likely to be similar elements in the human genome. His conclusion was that discovering these elements and probing an individual person's DNA with a specially selected set of these elements would allow certain recognition of the individual based upon a unique pattern, and thus a test could be developed that would identify rapists, murderers and others and could also be used to determine paternity, and genetic disease markers.[1][17][18]

Glassberg's research at Rockefeller University was under a grant that had no relationship to his construct of DNA fingerprinting, therefore he would not pursue such work in the University lab. He initially contacted the F.B.I. to let them know that a test could be developed to identify murderers and rapists, but was unable to find anyone interested in pursuing this idea. Rebuffed by the F.B.I., he raised funding (from National Distillers and Chemical Company, later renamed Quantum Chemical) and founded, with two colleagues from Rockefeller University, a biotechnology company, Lifecodes (originally named ACTAGEN, an acronym for advanced clinical testing and genetics) in March 1982. At the company, he led the research that turned out to prove his hypothesis, and developed these tests and demonstrated their utility in human forensic and paternity cases. The patent, entitled "Method for Forensic Analysis" was filed February 28, 1983. The patent, issued to Glassberg as inventor, covered the basic techniques used in DNA fingerprinting for many years, i.e., identifying DNA probes that recognize highly polymorphic regions of the human genome, comparing RFLP patterns of individuals' DNA probed with these DNA probes and computing the likelihood that an individual would match the pattern found.[1]

By late 1983, Glassberg and his co-workers at Lifecodes had used his research results to develop a test for identity and paternity.,[19] including use of the pAW101 probe originally isolated by Arlene Wyman and Ray White[20] Lifecodes used a number of probes isolated at Lifecodes that interacted with polymorphic loci, including probe pLM0.8 and a PRPP probe that interacted with DNA at many loci in the genome. Glassberg noted that a probe such as PRPP that interacted with multiple loci would not provide the stability and simplicity of analysis needed for serious legal cases. In addition, in order to calculate a probability that a person selected at random would match a particular sample, it was necessary to establish the frequency with which each allele is present in different human populations.[21][22]

Lifecodes personnel provided test cases in the first court trials in the United States. Glassberg and his colleagues subsequently negotiated agreements through which Lifecodes personnel also trained the F.B.I. and state forensic agencies. The first training of F.B.I. personnel in DNA forensics was conducted at Lifecodes by Lifecode scientists. One of the first F.B.I. scientists trained was Bruce Budowle, a Senior Scientist, who initially headed the F.B.I.’s effort in this area and who later became the Executive Director of the Institute of Applied Genetics at the Univ. of North Texas health Science Center, Ft. Worth, Texas.[23]

In 1986 Glassberg and co-founders, John Ford and Ronald Dorazio, sold Lifecodes Corporation to Quantum Chemical Corporation.

Conservation with Butterflies

Glassberg obtained a Doctorate of Jurisprudence (J.D.) from Columbia University School of Law in 1993 and is an adjunct professor in the Department of BioSciences at Rice University.[24]

In November 1992, Glassberg founded the North American Butterfly Association to engage the public in the support of conservation.

Field Guides

He is the author of seven butterfly field guides that use photographs of live butterflies, in addition to initiating and editing a field guide to dragonflies and one to wildflowers.

Glassberg was the first to write a butterfly field guide intended for readers to identify butterflies using binoculars. “His new book, “Butterflies Through Binoculars: A Field Guide to Butterflies in the Boston-New York-Washington Region”, published this year by Oxford University Press, is the first to focus on netless butterflying.”[4]:24 “His own “Butterflies through Binoculars”, published in 1993, is credited with revolutionizing the pursuit of butterflies with its emphasis on observation in the field”.[25]

In 1999, Robert Robbins, then chair of the Dept. of Entomology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, stated that “Glassberg’s butterfly guides have provided a new way for amateur naturalists to identify species without collecting them or dissecting them. Previously, he said, butterfly books distinguished between species using technical, almost microscopic details. But in Mr. Glassberg’s years of field observation, Dr. Robbins said, he has found variations in the way butterflies appear that allow species – or the sex of individuals of a species – to be distinguished simply by looking. The option of just watching butterflies and understanding what you’re seeing just wasn’t there before”.[26]

Glassberg’s 2001 book, “Butterflies through Binoculars: The West” received First Place in the Nature Guidebook Category of the 2001 National Outdoor Book Awards.[27]

Books

____ As sole author:

___ As co-author:

___ As editor:

References

  1. 1 2 3 Glassberg, J., (1997). "Method for Forensic Analysis". U.S. Patent 5,593,832, a continuation in part of Ser. No. 468,113 filed Feb. 28, 1983.
  2. ↑ ”1998: A Season of Butterflies at Botanica”. Botanica – The Wichita Gardens. 1998. Vol. XI, No. 3. p. 6
  3. ↑ Valdez, Criselda (Apr. 21, 2001) “Scientist promotes butterfly revolution”. The Brownsville Herald. pp. A1, A12.
  4. 1 2 3 Connor, Jack (Fall 1993). ""The Boom in Butterfly Watching". Defenders Magazine. Washington D.C.".
  5. 1 2 McGarrity, Mark (July 3, 2000). ""The Collector". Star-Ledger, New Jersey".
  6. ↑ New York Times Editorial. (July 2, 1995). “Of Cabbage Whites and Monarchs” The New York Times. p. 10.
  7. ↑ George Plimpton. (September 3, 1995). “Stalking the… Great Spangled Fritillary?”. The New York Times Magazine. pp. 38-41.
  8. ↑ Ehrlich, Paul R. (2001). “Twitching Butterflies”. Science 293 2007-2008.
  9. ↑ Glassberg, J.; Slomiany, R.A.; Stewart, C.R. (1977). "Selective screening procedure for the isolation of heat- and cold-sensitive DNA replication-deficient mutants of bacteriophage SP01 and preliminary characterization of the mutants isolated". J. Virology 21 54-60.
  10. ↑ Glassberg, J.; Franck, M.; Stewart, C.R. (1977). "Initiation and termination mutants of Bacillus subtilis bacteriophage SP01". J. Virology 21 147-152.
  11. ↑ Glassberg, J.; Franck, M.; Stewart, C.R. (1977). "Multiple origins of replication for Basillus subtilis phage SP01". Virology 78 433-441.
  12. ↑ Meyer, R.R.; Glassberg, J.; Kornberg, A. (1979). "An Escherichia coli mutant defective in single-strand binding protein is defective in DNA replication". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 76 1702-1705.
  13. ↑ Glassberg, J.; Meyer, R.R.; Kornberg, A. (1979). "Mutant single-strand binding protein of Escherichia coli: genetic and physiological characterization". J. Bacteriol. 140 14-19.
  14. ↑ Meyer, R.R.; Glassberg, J.; Scott, J.V.; Kornberg, A. (1980). "A temperature-sensitive single-strand DNA binding protein from Escherichia coli". J. Biol. Chem. 255 2897-2901.
  15. ↑ Meyer, R.R.; Rein, D.C.; Glassberg, J. (1982). "The product of the lexC gene of Escherichia coli is single-strand DNA-binding protein". J. Bacteriol. 150 433-435.
  16. ↑ Glassberg, J.; Miyazaki, L.; Rifkin, M.R. (1985) "Isolation and partial characterization of mutants of the trypanosomatid Crithidia fasciculata and their use in detecting genetic recombination". J. Protozool. 32 118-125.
  17. ↑ J. Glassberg. (August 22,23, 2008). Stanford Biochemistry Department 50th Anniversary Research Symposium. Poster presentation.
  18. ↑ Alan Giusti (July 14, 2013) comment at end of "DNA Forensic Profiling Anniversaries in June, July". PLOS/BLOGS. July 11, 2013. http://blogs.plos.org/dnascience/2013/07/11/dna-forensic-profiling-anniversaries-in-june-july/
  19. ↑ Giusti, A.; Baird, M.; Pasquale, S.; Balazs, I.; Glassberg. (1986). "Application of deoxyribonucleic acid polymorphisms to the analysis of DNA recovered from sperm". J. Forensic Sci. 31 409-417.
  20. ↑ Wyman, A.R.; White, R. (1980). "A Highly Polymorphic Locus in Human DNA". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 77 6754-6758.
  21. ↑ Baird, M.; Balazs, I.; Giusti, A.; Miyazaki, L.; Nicholas, L.; Wexler, K.; Kanter, E.; Glassberg, J.; Allen, S.; Rubinstein, P.; Sussman, L. (1986). "Allele frequency distributions of two highly polymorphic DNA sequences in three ethnic groups and its application to the determination of paternity". Am. J. Hum. Genetics 39 489-501.
  22. ↑ Morris, J.W.; Sanda, A.I.; Glassberg, J. (1989). "Biostatistical evaluation of evidence from continuous allele frequency distribution deoxyribonucleic acid probes in reference to disputed paternity and identity". J. Forensic Sci. 34 1311-1317.
  23. ↑ http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/events/criminal_justice/bios000.authcheckdam.pdf
  24. ↑ http:www.biosciences.rice.ed/Faculty Directory.aspx
  25. ↑ Nicole Arthur. (Washington Post) “Wings of Desire”. The Burlington Free Press. July 6, 2000. p. C1.
  26. ↑ Revkin, Andrew C. (July 20, 1999). “Letting Butterflies Flutter Free”. New York Times. The Metro Section. pp. B1, B8
  27. ↑ http://www.noba-web.org/books01.htm. p.4.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 8/27/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.