ABOVE: Jeff McKnight with his daughter Katherine
LAURA MCKNIGHT
Jeff McKnight, a molecular biologist at the University of Oregon interested in how cells package and maintain their DNA, died on October 4 after a brief battle with lymphoma that he documented on social media for thousands of his followers.
“He had this humility and vulnerability about him that was really endearing,” David Garcia, a molecular biologist at the University of Oregon and colleague of McKnight, tells The Scientist. “And like a lot of scientists, he just had this natural curiosity about life and how things work. He was really passionate about what he did, and he worked really hard.”
McKnight was well-known in his field for his work studying the structure of chromatin—a complex made up of strands of DNA wrapped around cores of proteins called histones—that controls when and how DNA can be accessed for replication and gene expression. Dozens ...
