Frank Ruddle, a trailblazer in genetic research and professor emeritus in both the Biology and Genetics departments, died Sunday at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He was 83.

Ruddles lab at Yale was the site of many scientific milestones beginning in the 1970s, including the first insertion of foreign genes into the mouse genome in 1980, which created the first transgenic animal and opened the way for scientific research on genetically modified organisms. Ruddle is credited with organizing the first human genome mapping workshop at Yale in 1973 and developing gene-mapping technology that helped lead to the establishment and success of the Human Genome Project. Ruddles friends, students and colleagues remember him as a quiet, generous man with a wonderful sense of humor and a passion for science.

I always felt that Frank was a pioneer in the field and really directed the project that eventually led to the mapping and sequencing of the human genome, said Raju Kucherlapati, a genetics professor at the Harvard Medical School who worked as a fellow in Ruddles lab in the 1970s. They are not given posthumously, but he deserves to win a Nobel Prize for that effort.

Born in 1929 in New Jersey to British parents, Ruddle grew up in Ohio and left high school early to join the U.S. Army Air Forces in Japan in 1946. He attended Wayne State University before receiving his masters degree jointly from Wayne State and the Childrens Hospital of Detroit and earning a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California-Berkeley. He joined the Yale faculty in 1961 after conducting postdoctoral research at Glasgow University.

During his 41 years at Yale, Ruddle served two terms as chair of the Biology Department for a total of 10 years. He mentored dozens of undergraduates, supervised about 52 postdoctoral fellows and guided 30 graduate students to their Ph.D.s.

Just as genomics began gaining international fame, Ruddle withdrew from traditional genetics and focused on developmental genetics, studying how a handful of similar genes control the development of multicellular organisms. During a sabbatical from Yale, he joined a team of scientists at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and, together with William McGinnis, cloned the first mouse homeobox gene in 1983.

The whole idea of transgenesis took off from his work, said Cooduvalli Shashikant, a biology professor at Penn State University who worked in Ruddles lab for nearly a decade in the 1980s and 1990s.

Ruddles research on the evolution and expression of genes in animals expanded the scientific communitys understanding of how humans develop and how genes vary between species, biology professor Ronald Breaker said in a Friday email. He added that Ruddles lab was a model for modern biology research labs because Ruddle used large teams to work on truly exciting research with profound implications.

Ruddle was a thoughtful, methodical man who knew exactly how much guidance and how much freedom to give researchers in his lab to help them thrive, former Yale postdoctoral fellows said.

Jon Gordon GRD 78 MED 80, the postdoctoral fellow who created the first transgenic mouse in Ruddles lab in 1980, said Ruddle always prioritized the advancement of human understanding of the world rather than emphasizing fame and career success, and he held his students to the same standard.

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Genetics ‘pioneer’ remembered for genome mapping contributions

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