Klaus Weber is a German scientist who has made many fundamentally important contributions to Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Molecular Biology, and was for many years the director of the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany.
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Weber was born in Lodz, Poland in 1936. After earning an undergraduate degree in 1962 and a graduate degree in 1964 from the University of Freiburg, Weber came to the United States to work as a postdoctoral fellow with James D. Watson at Harvard University.
After a successful period as a postdoctoral fellow with Watson starting in the spring of 1965, Weber was hired as an Assistant Professor at Harvard and ran a joint laboratory with Watson and Walter Gilbert. During this period he worked on protein chemistry of RNA phages, but was beginning to shift his focus to animal cells and their viruses, and spent a sabbatical at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory learning the associated techniques. Weber became a Full Professor at Harvard (1972), at the very young age of 36, only 10 years after obtaining an undergraduate degree. He is married to Mary Osborn, born in Darlington, England in 1940 who obtained an undergraduate degree from Cambridge University in England in 1962 and a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1967. They met when he was a research fellow in the Harvard laboratory. Osborn took a staff position first at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England (1969–1972) and then at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1972–1975). Together they produced the seminal "Weber and Osborn" SDS-PAGE paper, which showed that proteins could be dissolved in sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), reliably separated by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), visualized by Coomassie Brilliant Blue staining, and their molecular weights determined with reasonable accuracy. The title of the paper was "The reliability of molecular weight determinations by dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis".[1] This simple and quick technique rapidly became standard lab practice around the world and the original paper became one of the most highly cited in the history of science. The pair moved to Germany in 1975 when Weber was offered the position of Director of the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. There they pioneered another new technique: immunofluorescence microscopy. They and Elias Lazarides had previously found that they could tag the subunit proteins of microtubules, microfilaments, intermediate filaments and other cellular structures with specific antibodies and then tag these antibodies with a second fluorescently labelled antibody as described in a series of papers such as "Actin antibody: the specific visualization of actin filaments in non-muscle cells".[2] The fluorescent signal could be easily visualized using a fluorescence microscope and this allowed the rapid examination of the localization of molecules in cells and in tissues. This technique has also become a routine part of lab practice all around the world. He was also a coauthor on a third fundamentally important research report showing that RNA interference could be routinely used to "knock down" the expression of major cellular proteins, work he performed with Thomas Tuschl and collaborators. A few weeks work in Weber's lab produced the highly influential paper "Duplexes of 21-nucleotide RNAs mediate RNA interference in cultured mammalian cells".[3] This paper set the stage for the widespread use of RNA interference to turn off the expression of normal genes in mammalian systems, a centrally important cell biological technique. In summary, he contributed to the development of three of the most significant and widely used lab techniques in routine use in labs all over the world. Among his less high profile achievements are hundreds of well-cited studies concentrating mostly on the function of the cytoskeleton. In 1984 he, along with George Gee Jackson and Werner Franke, won the prestigious Ernst Jung Prize for excellence in biomedical sciences. He retired in 2004, and is now an emeritus professor at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Although retired, he is still contributing to the scientific literature. His wife Mary Osborn officially closed her research laboratory at the end of the following year, but is also still active in science. Throughout their long careers, Klaus Weber and Mary Osborn have collaborated with and mentored many accomplished scientists in addition to their many notable scientific achievements.