WHITEHEAD INSTITUTE FOR BIOMEDICAL RESEARCHSusan Lindquist, a molecular biologist at MIT and the Whitehead Institute, whose studies on protein folding lent insight into gene expression, evolution, and prions, died this week from cancer (October 27). She was 67.
“Sue was the most creative, out of the box scientific thinker I’ve known,” Brooke Bevis, Lindquist’s lab manager, said in a press release issued by the Whitehead Institute. “She had a unique biological intuition—an instinct for the way things worked and the right questions to ask. And she was indefatigable, seeming to draw strength and stamina from the science itself.”
Lindquist was well known for her work on heat shock proteins as protein folding chaperones and on prions’ roles in evolution. Her team uncovered mechanisms for how prions can transmit heritable information through the misfolded proteins alone.
The Chicago native earned a PhD from Harvard University and established her first lab in the late 1970s at the University of Chicago, where she studied heat shock ...
