User:JMWSlack

Jonathan Slack did his first degree in Biochemistry at Oxford University and his PhD at Edinburgh University. He became interested in the molecular basis of embryonic development, and after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, became a staff scientist with the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK), working in London and later in Oxford. During this period he studied how chemical signals called inducing factors control the formation of the body pattern during early embryonic development. In 1986, using the frog Xenopus as the experimental organism, he was the first to identify an embryonic inducing factor, fibroblast growth factor, and later showed that this family of inducing factors had a prominent role in controlling the formation of the head-to-tail pattern in the embryo. This mechanism was later shown by others to apply to all vertebrate animals. He moved to the University of Bath in 1995, and was Head of the Department of Biology and Biochemistry from 2000-2006. In 2007 he moved to the University of Minnesota in the USA and until 2013 was Director of its Stem Cell Institute, also holding the Tulloch Chair of Stem Cell Biology. He is now retired but continues some academic writing and teaching at Bath. His recent research work focused on the mechanisms of regeneration of missing parts, and on methods for inducing the transformation of one tissue type into another by overexpression of specific genes. He has a particular interest in attempting to reprogram other tissue types into pancreatic beta cells, which could be used for the treatment of some types of diabetes. He has published over 200 research and review papers in scientific journals, and has also written five books. “From Egg to Embryo” (1983,1991) served to introduce experimental embryology to molecular biologists. “Egg and Ego” (1999) is a light-hearted account of life in academic science. "Essential Developmental Biology" (2001, 2005, 2013) is an undergraduate textbook. Two titles for the Oxford University Press "Very Short Introduction" series are "Stem Cells" 2012, and "Genes" 2014, both introductions for the general public. He is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), was awarded the Waddington Medal of the British Society for Developmental Biology in 2002, and elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2004. He is married with 2 daughters.

Personal website: http://www.bath.ac.uk/bio-sci/contacts/academics/jonathan_slack/

Textbook website: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470923512.html

Transdifferentiation website: http://www.transdifferentiation.com/