Roy J. Britten, 1919–2012: Our early years at Caltech

Abstract

Roy Britten died in Costa Mesa, California on January 21, 2012, of pancreatic cancer at age 92. His work in the 1960s, in which he used renaturation kinetics to provide a quantitative image of the single-copy and repetitive sequence content of animal genomes, was of gigantic intellectual import, and it essentially built the ground floor of the edifice that we call genomics today. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1972. At the beginning of the 1970s, Roy and I teamed up as scientific partners, and we relocated to Caltech. At Caltech, we worked together for over one-quarter of a century, and most of the following work consists of a very brief retrospective on the eventful first decade of our Caltech partnership. Later, in the 1990s, Roy returned to focus on his old interests in evolutionary processes that affect genomic sequence content. He continued to carry out computational analyses on the roles of mobile elements and other processes that ceaselessly remodel genomes, particularly primate genomes, almost until his death; his last paper, "Transposable element insertions have strongly affected human evolution," was published in PNAS in November of 2010 when he was 91 years old.

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