Werner Arber (born 3 June 1929 in
Gränichen,
Aargau) is a
Swiss microbiologist and
geneticist. Along with American researchers
Hamilton Smith and
Daniel Nathans, Werner Arber shared the 1978
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of
restriction endonucleases. Their work would lead to the development of
recombinant DNA technology.
Werner Arber studied
chemistry and
physics at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zürich from 1949 to 1953. Late in 1953 he took an assistantship for electron microscopy at the
University of Geneva, in time left the electron microscope, went on to research
bacteriophages and write his dissertation on defective
lambda prophage mutants.
He received his doctorate in 1958 from the University of Geneva.
Arber then worked at the
University of Southern California in phage genetics with Gio ("Joe") Bertani starting in the summer of 1958.
Late in 1959 he accepted an offer to return to Geneva at the beginning of 1960, but only after spending "several very fruitful weeks"
at each of the laboratories of
Gunther Stent (
University of California, Berkeley),
Joshua Lederberg and
Esther Lederberg (
Stanford University) and
Salvador Luria (
Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Back at the University of Geneva, Arber worked in a laboratory in the basement of the Physics Institute, where he carried out productive research and hosted "a number of first class graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and senior scientists."
In 1965 the University of Geneva promoted him to Extraordinary Professor for Molecular Genetics. In 1971, after spending a year as a visiting professor in the Department of
Molecular Biology of the University of California in Berkeley, Arber moved to the
University of Basel. In Basel, he was one of the first persons to work in the newly-constructed
Biozentrum, which housed the departments of biophysics, biochemistry, microbiology, structural biology, cell biology and pharmacology and was thus conducive to interdisciplinary research.
Werner Arber is member of the
World Knowledge Dialogue Scientific Board and of the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 1981. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed him as President of the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences on January 2011, making him the first Protestant to hold the position.
In 1966, He became a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University, and became assistant professor in 1968, working with Nobel laureate Herbert C. Brown. In 1972, he went on to become associate professor at Syracuse University where, in 1979, he was promoted to professor. In the same year, he went back to Purdue University.
