Allan C. Spradling

Allan C. Spradling directs the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology in Baltimore and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Chicago before switching to biology in the hopes that it was not “too late.” He first became interested in the Drosophila genome at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his PhD in 1975 for using polytene chromosomes as a genome array to co-discover the heat shock response.

A long infatuation with the Drosophila ovary began during a postdoctoral stint at Indiana University, where he discovered the first protein-coding genes to undergo amplification during development.In 1980 Spradling accepted a faculty position at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore, and two years later he and colleague Gerry Rubin, who currently directs HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus, developed a general method to introduce DNA into the Drosophila genome.

He teamed up with Rubin again in1991 to found the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project. Spradling’s role was to scale up a method he had developed earlier that uses special genetic strains to provide “instant” experimental access to individual Drosophila genes. The widely used project continues to this day and now encompasses more than 2/3 of fly genes.