Working on Bacteriophage Lambda

I was accepted at UC Berkeley, and I went through a year of rotations and I decided to work on bacteriophage lambda, largely because I was really intrigued by the fact that this lambda phage had two lifestyles. It could be lysogenic and integrate itself into a bacterial host and just stay there forever until it got induced to come out, or it could be lytic, it could grow and produce lots of phage. And I wondered, what was the mechanism, how could it do that? And Lou Reichardt, when he was in Dale Kaiser's lab, and Mark Ptashne of course in his own research, had figured out there was lambda repressor and that that was the central control element. And Lou Reichardt discovered, thought that there might be autoregulation of lambda repressor, that it might control its own synthesis. And I read all his papers. And when I went to graduate school, I decided I wanted to figure out how this lysogenic state was actually established and maintained.

Working for Harrison Echols

I was working for Harrison Echols. I decided to work for Harrison Echols, and I told him this project that I wanted to work on, and he said, Barbara, we just don't have the tools to do it, it's extremely hard to do this project. Why don't you map all the promoters of lambda phage because we don't even know where the promoters are. And so, he said, go to Mike Chamberlain's lab and learn about RNA polymerase, so I was disappointed, but I was dutiful. So, I went to Mike Chamberlain's lab to learn about RNA polymerase, but still I dreamed about lambda repressor and lysogeny.

Meeting Mark Ptashne

And so I was learning about polymerase and making my own polymerase preparations and making my own restriction enzymes because I had to make restriction fragments to map the promoters of lambda. And Mark Ptashne came and give a seminar at UCSF, and I went to his seminar and he and Tom Maniatis had just mapped all the operator regions of lambda, and he was talking about this amazing work of Tom Maniatis when first they were both in England and then at Harvard, and I was completely dazzled. I asked him a million questions and he said, who are you? Are you a postdoc? I said, no, I'm just a graduate student. He said, well, stop thinking about this. You can't possibly compete with this. I laughed. I laughed and said, I can't possibly compete with you. But about a year later, I went to Cold Spring Harbor to the phage meetings.

Dr. Barbara Meyer is a genetics, genomics and development professor in the molecular and cell biology department at University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as an adjunct professor in the biochemistry and biophysics department at University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine and an HHMI investigator. Dr. Meyer completed her undergraduate studies at Stanford University and began her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and finished at Harvard University. During her post-doctoral work, she researched how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans at the Cambridge University Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Dr. Sydney Brenner.

Dr. Meyer received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Stanford University in 1971, her Master of Science in Molecular Biology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1975, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in 1979. She then began post-doctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to research how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans. After completing her work at the MRC, she established her first lab at MIT to further analyze sex determination mechanisms.

Dr. Meyer was a tenured professor at MIT until 1990 where she became a genetics, genomics, and development professor at the University of California-Berkeley. In 1995, she became a member of the American Association of Cell Biology and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also became an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1997, where she and her lab successfully identified the master gene involved in sex determination. This breakthrough has helped advance research on chromosome repression and X chromosome dosage compensation.

Dr. Meyer has received many awards for her work, including the Genetics Society of America Medal in 2010, the Francis Amory Prize in Medicine and Physiology by the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2017, the E.B. Wilson Medal by the American Society for Cell Biology’s highest honor for science, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, and was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine all in 2018.