Molecular biologist Gunther Stent dies

Gunther Siegmund Stent, whose work on bacteriophages helped establish the foundations of molecular biology, died on June 12 of pneumonia. "He was a very remarkable guy. It's hard for any one person to get a full appreciation of what he's done because his interests were so broad," said David Weisblat a molecular and cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a postdoc with Stent in the late 1970s. Over the course of his life, Stent studied molecular biology, neurobiology, developmental biology, as well as the philosophy of science, consciousness. He was always driven towards the "next frontier," in science, said Weisblat. Stent was greatly influenced by Max Delbruck, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for his work demonstrating that linkurl:bacterial resistance;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54522/ is caused by random mutation rather than adaptive change. Stent completed his PhD in physical chemistry at the University of Illinois in...