Laurence “Larry” Kedes, a molecular geneticist and biological chemist, died January 6 at age 83 following a period of declining health. Kedes’s work often placed him at the forefront of emerging technologies, from DNA sequencing to bioinformatics, and he capitalized on such tools to further scientists’ understanding of how genes are regulated.
“Larry excelled at finding interesting problems, asking the right questions, and then working with the best people to answer them,” says Pragna Patel, a human geneticist at the University of Southern California (USC) who was first recruited to the university by Kedes. “He was a man who was ahead of his time in terms of thinking about biological problems.”
Born in 1937, Kedes attended Wesleyan University for three years before transferring to Stanford University’s School of Medicine for his bachelor’s and medical degrees. After graduating in 1962, Kedes completed postdoctoral research at the National Cancer Institute and MIT ...
