1. Michael Ashburner served as joint-head and co-founder of the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
20 Facts About Michael Ashburner
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Michael Ashburner studied the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student of Churchill College, Cambridge, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in Genetics in 1964.
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Michael Ashburner's PhD was supervised by Alan Henderson and awarded in 1968, followed by a Doctor of Science in 1978.
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Michael Ashburner collaborated widely and mentored numerous PhD students and postdoctoral research students during his career.
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Michael Ashburner was a member of the consortium that eventually sequenced and annotated the Drosophila melanogaster genome.
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Michael Ashburner was an early pioneer in the application of computers to biology.
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Michael Ashburner's contributions include his active participation in setting up FlyBase and the development of Open Biomedical Ontologies to allow machine-searchable annotation of biological information, particularly the Gene Ontology and ChEBI.
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Michael Ashburner was instrumental in establishing the EBI, as well as securing its location in the UK, and acted as the first head of the EBI jointly with Graham Cameron.
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Additionally, Michael Ashburner made a strong case for the human genome published in Science in 2000 by Celera Genomics to be made freely available, and spoke out repeatedly against the privatization of genomic resources.
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Michael Ashburner was one of the signatories of the first open letter to Science in 2001 calling for a centralized, open repository of the scientific literature, and subsequently became a strong advocate of Open Access publishing, speaking out for this cause in the scientific literature and popular media.
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Michael Ashburner provided written evidence to the UK Parliament Select Committee on Science and Technology supporting Open Access publishing and served on the initial advisory board of UK PubMed Central, the first global mirror site of the PubMed Central repository of freely available biological literature.
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Michael Ashburner was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.
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Michael Ashburner received the Gregor Mendel Medal from the Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic in 1998, the first George W Beadle Award of the Genetics Society of America in 1999, an honorary Doctorate from the University of Crete in 2002, an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Edinburgh in 2003, the Genetics Society Medal of the UK Genetics Society in 2005 and the Franklin Award of the Bioinformatics Organization in 2006.
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Michael Ashburner was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990, his certificate of election reads:.
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Michael Ashburner was the first to make a comprehensive map of puffs in the salivary gland polytene chromosomes and to define the stage at which each was expressed.
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Michael Ashburner went on to demonstrate the effects of various stimuli, especially heat-shock and ecdysone, on puffing at specific loci, and correlated particular puffs with particular gene products.
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Michael Ashburner has unique standing as a scholar and authority in the whole area of Drosophila research.
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Michael Ashburner was awarded Member of the Academia Europaea in 1989.
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Michael Ashburner married Francesca Ryan and had one son and two daughters, Rebecca, Geoffrey and Isabel.
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Michael Ashburner died on 7 July 2023, at the age of 81.