"Russo-French Geneticist" Boris Ephrussi Signed FDC Dated 1963 Todd Mueller COA

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"Russo-French Geneticist" Boris Ephrussi Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1963.
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ES-4382
Boris Ephrussi
(
Russian
:
Борис Самойлович Эфрусси
; 9 May 1901 – 2 May 1979), Professor of Genetics at the
University of Paris
, was a
Russo
-
French
geneticist
. Boris was born on 9 May 1901 into a
Jewish
family. His father, Samuel Osipovich Ephrussi, was a chemical engineer; his grandfather, Joseph Ephrusi (Efrusi), was the founder of a
banking dynasty
in
Kishinev
. He published two papers in November 1966 which represented a key step in a decade of research in his laboratory. This research helped transform
mammalian
, and especially
human
, genetics. Boris started his
scientific
training as a Russian
émigré
in 1920. He studied the initiation and regulation of
embryological
processes by
intracellular
and
extracellular
factors. A major strand of his early research concerned the effect of temperature on the development of
fertilized
sea urchin
eggs
. In this work he used a micromanipulator, which was developed by
Robert Chambers
, an
American
biologist. During Ephrussi's time, writing a second
dissertation
was standard practice in France. Ephrussi's involved
culturing tissues
.
[1]
Ephrussi ran into difficulties typically associated with early tissue culture techniques, but despite these obstacles Ephrussi managed to conclude from studies of
brachyury
in
mice
that intrinsic factors (i.e.
genes
) play a key role in
development
. As the next phase of his
career
, Ephrussi coupled his embryological concerns with a firm conviction that one must understand the role of genes in order to decipher embryological processes. He moved to
Caltech
in 1934 and stayed until 1935 to learn genetics within the intellectual empire of
T.H. Morgan
. This move was supported by the
Rockefeller Foundation
. During this period he conducted important work with
George Beadle
, who joined him in
Paris
in the autumn of 1935. There they produced results from experiments with
Drosophila
eye
transplants
.
This became integral to the work of
Beadle
and
Tatum
, who were working with
Neurospora
, and from this research developed the '
one gene, one enzyme
' hypothesis. During
World War II
, Ephrussi spent most of his time as a
refugee
at Johns Hopkins University. Following this he began work in France on
yeast
and
cytoplasmic
genetics. He began working at the
Institut de Biologie Physicochimique
(the Rothschild Institute) in Paris, and later worked at the
CNRS
at
Gif-sur-Yvette
, where he studied the contribution of cytoplasm to the cell
phenotype
and pursued the interactions between
nuclear
and cytoplasmic genetic endowments necessary to the yielding of an intact, functioning (albeit
single-celled
)
organism
.
Boris Ephrussi was a pioneer in questioning the consensus at the time that
heredity
could be accounted for exclusively by nuclear genes.
[5]
[6]
Ephrussi famously said, "we cannot determine the truth of a hypothesis by counting the number of people who believe it."
Ephrussi continued to work on the topics he was primarily interested until the late 1970s. Topics covered included
·
using
hybrids
with
teratomas
to explore determination and differentiation (e.g.
Finch and Ephrussi 1967
;
Kahan and Ephrussi 1970
).
·
negative regulation of differentiated function (e.g.
Davidson, Ephrussi and Yamamoto 1966
;
Fougbre, Ruiz and Ephrussi 1972
).
·
cellular and genetic biological approaches over a direct attack at the
molecular
level (
Ephrussi 1970
, page 12).
In 1974 Ephrussi won a
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
from
Columbia University
. Ephrussi lived to see that transplantation was transforming into a genetic tool that would take on a new and more powerful aspect in the molecular era. However he died before seeing the genetic advances made by DNA recombination studies which had been set in motion by the studies he had undertaken. It can be said that Ephrussi was a pioneer of embryology and a main contributor to the reconciliation of modern genetics and
Embryology
. He was married to Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor (1918–1968), a geneticist.