Profile of Andrew W. Murray

Abstract

While speaking about his work as a biologist, Harvard University’s Andrew W. Murray likes to quote the words found on theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s blackboard on his death: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Murray, who feels he has much in common with physicists as well as biologists, uses Feynman’s quote to explain aspects of his own research, including his work as a graduate student creating an artificial chromosome and the research reported in his Inaugural Article (1), which uses synthetic biology to examine how cell differentiation evolved in multicellular organisms. “The point of building synthetic things is to determine whether you really understand the science behind their natural counterparts,” he explains. Murray, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, and the Director of the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University. Andrew W. Murray. Image courtesy of Renate Hellmiss (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA). Murray grew up outside Cambridge, England, in the small town of Linton, a child of expatriates from the United States. His parents met at the Trevi Fountain in Rome while traveling after graduating from college. They married three months later in Naples and moved to Cambridge, where Murray’s father held a fellowship to study Italian history. As his father completed his PhD over the next seven years, Murray and his four siblings were born, leaving the family “solidly settled in England.” “When I was six,” recalls Murray, “I used to orbit the back yard, pretending to be [cosmonaut] Yuri Gagarin, and when I was 12, I wanted to be a race car driver. No coordination and slow reflexes persuaded me that studying might be a useful backup plan, and by the end of high school, …