Richard Myers on Disease Resistance Genes
  Richard Myers     Biography    
Recorded: 29 May 2003

We’ve dabbled some in the disease resistance. It’s a hard problem because you have to identify people who are resistant if you’re going to try to find… and proving that somebody… So that the HIV resistant gene that was found, the CCR5 deletion that was found, was because there are large numbers of people who you know are exposed and who don’t convert. In other diseases it’s a little harder to do that. And so I think there’ll be some, some… getting the phenotype, essentially getting the individuals with the phenotype will be the hard part there. Finding the genes once you get there I think will be, you know, could be straight forward.

Richard Myers, biochemist and geneticist, is currently Director of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama.

Following his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Alabama (B.S., 1977), Dr. Myers earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley (1982) with Robert Tjian. His postdoctoral work was performed at Harvard University with Tom Maniatis. In 1986 he joined the faculty of the University of California at San Francisco, and remained there until 1993 when he moved to Stanford University School of Medicine. He had been Professor and Chair of the Department of Genetics and Director of the Stanford Human Genome Center until July 2008 when he was named to his current position.

Dr. Myers is a member of numerous committees concerned with human genetic diseases and the Human Genome Project including the Genome Resources and Sequencing Prioritization Panel (GRASPP) and is Chair of the Genome Research Review Committee of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health. He is also a member of the Biology and Biotechnology Program Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Myers has received numerous awards including the Pritzker Foundation Award (2002), the Darden Lecture Award from the University of Alabama (2002), the Wills Foundation Award (1986-2001) and was a Searle Scholar (1987-1990).

Myers was involved in every human genome meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and has attended CSHL symposia since 1986.