David Botstein

David Botstein (September 8, 1942 – February 27, 2026) was an American molecular biologist, professor of genetics, and biogerontologist, known for his research on DNA sequencing with medical applications. From 2013 to 2023, he was the founding Chief Science Officer of Calico (company) Calico Life Sciences. He was elected in 1981 a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in 1985 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1993 a Member of the National Academy of Medicine Institute of Medicine (now named the National Academy of Medicine), in 2008 a Member of the American Philosophicl Society, and in 2014 a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research. Botstein was awarded in 2013 the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and in 2020 the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal of the Genetics Society of America Quotes There is something about teaching that makes you a better researcher. I know this is very countercultural wisdom, but I believed it all along. Salvador Luria Luria, Boris Magasanik Magasanik, and Cyrus Levinthal Levinthal all believed it. Levinthal and Luria both had a very strong influence on me in this regard. as quoted by Jane Gitschier in: https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.0020079 10.1371/journal.pgen.0020079 2006 Willing to Do the Math: An Interview with David Botstein PLoS Genetics 2 5 e79 ... the principles and practices are: Focus on the important ideas and do them well. Teach every idea from the viewpoint of the technology of today. And never go out of the way to teach from history and never go for coverage. What we want is skill and not coverage and breadth. The students are enrolled by self-selection. An Integrated Science Curriculum at Princeton April 2011 iBiology https://www.ibiology.org/science-and-society/integrated-science-curriculum-princeton/ (quote at 12:19 of 14:59) Our capacity to do DNA sequencing sequence is growing by leaps and bounds, although, our capacity to interpret sequence is lagging behind. And it is one of the reasons that I went to Princeton, to try to rearrange a curriculum so that biologists will know more statistics and more mathematics, and more of the, sort of, hard science that is required to make sense out of some of the things that the genome is telling us. Part 1: Fruits of the Genome Sequences June 2011 iBiology https://www.ibiology.org/genetics-and-gene-regulation/fruits-genome-sequences/ (quote at 51:23 of 1:38) Quotes about David Botstein My geneticist colleague David Botstein often begins lectures by explaining that the essence of biology is living with uncertainty. He especially emphasizes this to audiences of physicists, because he knows that they have a hard time with the concept and will misinterpret much of what he says unless alerted to the issue ahead of time. He has never revealed to me how he thinks about such audiences, but I happen to know that most biologists consider the physicists' obsession with certainty and correctness to be exasperatingly childish and evidence of their limited mental capacities. Physicists, in contrast, consider tolerance of uncertainty to be an excuse for second-rate experimentation and a potential source of false claims. Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Bottom Down Basic Books 2008 9780786722181 https://books.google.com/books?id=hTFK66L0mYAC (272 pages; 1st edition 2005) External links Category:1942 births Category:2026 deaths Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Geneticists Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Jews from the United States Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Category:Members of the National Academy of Medicine Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Category:Princeton University faculty Category:Scientists from New York (state) Category:Stanford University faculty] Category:University of Michigan alumni