Shirley Tilghman
Tilghman, Shirley (1946-) is a molecular biologist who is well known for her discoveries of how genes regulate the development of mammalian embryos. She is also one of the designers of the Human Genome Project, whose goal is to sequence all of the DNA in human beings.
Shirley Marie Tilghman was born in 1946 in Toronto, Canada, and became interested in chemistry in high school. She attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where she conducted her first original laboratory research on the replication of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). She earned a B.S. degree with honors in 1968, then went to Sierra Leone in West Africa, where she spent two years teaching secondary school. Upon her return to North America, she entered Temple University, Philadelphia, and studied normal control of glucose metabolism in the liver, earning her Ph.D. degree in 1975. She conducted postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health as a Fogarty International Fellow, where she worked on cloning of the first mammalian gene. She returned to Temple University in 1978, and the following year worked at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia investigating the gene that encodes a fetal protein.
Tilghman's major discoveries came after she joined the faculty in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University in 1986, first as Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences, and then as Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 1988. Using mice, she studied parental imprinting of genes, which is a chemical mark attached to the gene during egg or sperm development. It also marks the gene so that its parental origin can be distinguished and expressed. Most imprinted genes then seem to govern how the fetus grows. Her research revealed that crossing two related mouse species results in abnormal gene imprinting and growth abnormalities in the hybrid offspring.
She is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and in 1996 was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1999, she was appointed director of the Institute for Genomic Analysis at Princeton. In 2001, she was named president of Princeton University.