13 Facts About Boris Ephrussi

Boris Ephrussi, Professor of Genetics at the University of Paris, was a Russo-French geneticist.

Boris Ephrussi's father, Samuel Osipovich Ephrussi, was a chemical engineer; his grandfather, Joseph Ephrusi, was the founder of a banking dynasty in Kishinev.

Boris Ephrussi published two papers in November 1966 which represented a key step in a decade of research in his laboratory.

Boris Ephrussi started his scientific training as a Russian emigre in 1920.

Boris Ephrussi studied the initiation and regulation of embryological processes by intracellular and extracellular factors.

Boris Ephrussi began working at the Institut de biologie physico-chimique 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 organism.

Boris Ephrussi was a pioneer in questioning the consensus at the time that heredity could be accounted for exclusively by nuclear genes.

Boris Ephrussi was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society in 1970.

Boris Ephrussi continued to work on the topics he was primarily interested until the late 1970s.

In 1974 Boris Ephrussi won a Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

Boris 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.

Boris Ephrussi was married to Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor, a geneticist.

Boris Ephrussi's daughter, Anne Ephrussi, is a geneticist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.