Bruce Baker, a geneticist who studied gene-behavior interactions in Drosophila melanogaster, died on July 1. He was 72 years old.
“Bruce had enormous respect for the details of science, not only the science in his own lab but also that of his peers,” Deborah Andrew, a biologist at Johns Hopkins and one of Baker’s former graduate students, writes in an obituary posted by the Genetics Society of America.
Baker was born in Swannanoa, North Carolina in 1945. After completing his undergraduate studies at Reed College in 1966 and receiving a PhD from the University of Washington in 1971, Baker joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego. In 1986, he became a professor at Stanford University, where he remained for more than two decades before moving to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in 2008.
Over the course of his career, Baker published more than 150 ...
