Hogness spent most of his youth in Chicago, the son of
Thorfin R. Hogness and Phoebe S. Hogness. His parents were both children of immigrants and graduates of the
University of Minnesota; his father later received a PhD in chemistry from the
University of California, Berkeley, taught at Berkeley, and in 1930 joined the faculty at the
University of Chicago. After service in the Navy, David Hogness acquired his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1949 at the
California Institute of Technology; and in 1952, his PhD in biology and chemistry. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked with a scholarship of the
National Research Council with
Jacques Monod at the
Pasteur Institute, and with a grant from the
National Science Foundation at
New York University. In 1955, Hogness became an instructor of microbiology at
Washington University School of Medicine and was promoted to assistant professor in 1957. In 1959, he moved to
Stanford University School of Medicine. In 1961, he became an associate professor and in 1966, he was promoted to full professor of biochemistry. In 1989, he also became a joint faculty member in Stanford's newly created Department of Developmental Biology. He was professor emeritus since 1999. Hogness married Judith Gore in 1948; the couple had two sons. ==Research==