ABOVE: COURTESY OF RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
Joachim Messing, the longtime director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, died on September 13 at the age of 73. He was perhaps best known for developing a widely used DNA analysis technique known as shotgun sequencing, in which the nucleic acid is broken into chunks that can be analyzed simultaneously.
“Jo’s approach to the development of his DNA sequencing tools was to spread them freely and widely”—that is, he did not patent them, Robert Goodman, the executive dean of agriculture and natural resources at Rutgers, tells The New York Times. “He was an incredibly generous man.”
Messing grew up in post–World War II Germany, where he decided to study pharmacy as an undergraduate and master’s student because it encompassed a range of scientific areas. He then pursued a doctorate in biochemistry from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he began to ...
