CLYDE A. HUTCHISON III
Distinguished Professor, Synthetic Biology Group,
J. Craig Venter Institute, San Diego, CA
Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillCOURTESY OF CLYDE HUTCHISONAs an undergraduate at Yale University, Clyde Hutchison III was required by his financial-assistance package to have a part-time job. Planning to major in physics, he had lined up a sophomore-year job with an astrophysicist. But Hutchison returned to school to find that the professor had given the job to someone else. “I was pretty upset, because the people assigning jobs wanted me to work in an accounting office, and I was not interested in that. I pleaded with them to find me a science job.” Hutchison got his wish: he was assigned to work in Harold Morowitz’s biophysics lab, a placement Hutchison says has directed his career trajectory up to the present day. He worked with Morowitz’s postdoc, Carl Woese, who went on to discover Archaea as the third domain of life. “I went from working in the dining hall freshman year to working with Carl Woese, one of the most influential people in biology.” With Woese, Hutchison studied chemicals, including L-alanine, that could trigger bacterial spore germination, publishing his first paper in 1958.
While Hutchison always knew that he would major in science and, emulating his chemist father, that he would pursue a PhD and a career as a researcher, it was the influence of the Morowitz lab that pulled him from physics to biology. In 1960, he moved on to Caltech to do PhD in biology.
Here, Hutchison traces his path from studying genomes to synthesizing them, explains why he likes to “think small,” and reveals why he still finds himself at the lab bench after all these years.
Late bloomer. Hutchison was born in 1938 in New York City, where his father, Clyde A. Hutchison Jr., a physical chemist, was a postdoc at Columbia and later returned there to participate in the Manhattan Project, working on ...
