Profile of Philip Hieter

Abstract

To bakers, yeast is important for leavening dough. To geneticist Philip Hieter, yeast can help unravel human disease. Hieter, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Michael Smith Laboratories and member of the National Academy of Sciences, believes that model organisms, such as yeast, represent the future of genetics, as discoveries made using such organisms are increasingly linked to human disorders. Philip Hieter. Image courtesy of Philip Hieter. Hieter, born in 1952, grew up in Garden City, New York, with two older brothers and an older sister. As an undergraduate at The Johns Hopkins University in the early 1970s, Hieter worked in the laboratory of Carl Levy, who worked to isolate ribonuclease enzymes from soil in an early effort at RNA sequencing. A year after graduating, Hieter attended a seminar given by Philip Leder, a molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Leder and his colleagues had just cloned mouse antibody genes using bacteriophage cloning vectors, and were studying the phenomenon of genetic recombination that endows the immune system with a rich array of antibodies. “The talk blew my mind,” Hieter says. Inspired, Hieter arranged to work as a graduate student in Leder’s laboratory. Mentored by postdoctoral scholar John Seidman (“a wizard,” Hieter says), Hieter cloned the κ and λ light-chain genes that encode human antibodies. “Cloning the first gene took forever,” Hieter says, but once he cloned the κ gene (1), the λ gene soon followed (2). Hieter, Seidman, and immunologist Stan Korsmeyer worked together to investigate the nature of B-cell leukemias, blood cancers that affect immune system cells (3). The work led to Hieter’s doctoral dissertation (4) and the 1981 Council of Graduate Schools/University Microfilms International Dissertation Prize. About a year before Hieter’s graduation, Leder suggested that he start exploring options for a …