Seymour Jonathan Singer

Seymour Jonathan Singer (born 1924) is a cell biologist and professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego.^[1] He was born in New York City. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Linus Pauling at Caltech during 1947-1948. He co-discovered the basis of abnormal hemoglobin in sickle-cell anemia, reported in the famous paper "Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease". He worked for U.S. Public Health Service between 1948 and 1951. He joined Yale University as assistant professor in 1951. There he developed the ferritin-antibody, which was the first electron-dense reagent used for cell staining in electron microscopy imaging. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Molecular & Cellular Biology in 1959.^[2]

In 1961 he joined the faculty at University of California, San Diego. Work in his laboratory on the conformation of membrane proteins was initiated in 1965 by John Lenard, a post-doctoral fellow, resulting in the publication of two foundational papers (Lenard, John and Singer, S.J. Protein conformation in cell membrane preparations as studied by optical rotatory dispersion and circular dichroism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 56, 1828-1835, 1966; Lenard, John and Singer, S. J. Structure of membranes: Reaction of red cell membranes with phospholipase C. Science 159, 738, 1968). He then began to work with Garth L. Nicolson on membrane proteins and aided in the development of the "Fluid Mosaic Model" of the cell membrane. Their landmark paper was published as "The Fluid Mosaic Model of the Structure of Cell Membranes", in Science in 1972.^[3] He later studied the cytoskeleton. In 2001, he published a book, The Splendid Feast of Reason, regarding rationalism and the philosophy of science.

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