ABOVE: STEVE GLADFELTER
Stanford University biochemist and developmental biologist Dale Kaiser, whose work provided the conceptual basis for gene editing, died of complications due to Parkinson’s disease at his home in California on June 5, 2020. He was 92.
“Dale was a scientist the way Darwin was a scientist,” Lucy Shapiro, a developmental biologist and colleague of Kaiser at Stanford, tells The Scientist. His sharp mind and insatiable curiosity led him to constantly question the way the natural world worked, and he was tireless in his research, spending six days a week in the lab throughout his career up until last year. “His science was his life,” Shapiro says.
Kaiser was born November 10, 1927, in Piqua, Ohio. As a kid, he experimented with explosives and learned how to fix broken radios. From his father, he developed a love of “nature’s world,” he wrote in 2013. At age 18, he ...
