The New York Times just posted in their Science section an article on Jerry Yang’s death. If you don’t know who he is, he was a professor at the University of Connecticut and a pioner in the farm animal cloning field. (Read more about him here.) I guess you’re allowed to be late on obituaries?
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Jerry Yang put UConn on the list of top biotech institutions in the US after producing the first cloned farm animal. He was the first scientist in the world to produce male clones from a prize Japanese breeding bull in 1988. He was also first to report abnormal expression of X-linked genes in cloned animals. Furthermore, he first reported that cloned animals have telomeres of normal length, an important observation, since telomeres function as disposable buffers at the ends of chromosomes, preventing loss of genetic information essential to cellular function.
He passed away today, at age 49, in Boston after a long battle with cancer.
He has a motivating life story. “The year after he was born, Yang nearly starved to death in a village called Dongcun, about 300 miles south of Beijing.
Yang was placed in the prestigious Beijing Agricultural University, where his high test scores earned him a coveted opportunity to pursue a graduate education in the United States.
Yang proved that early reports that clones would age prematurely were false. The FDA relied heavily on Yang’s work when it found meat dairy products from cloned farm animals were safe to eat and drink.”
[Via Newsday via Hartford Courant[]
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