Max Birnstiel

Birnstiel was born in Brazil in 1933; his father, also Max Birnstiel, was Swiss and his mother, Dalila Varella, was Brazilian. The family moved to Switzerland when the younger Max was five years old, and he was educated in Zurich. He received his Ph.D. in botany in 1959 from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Albert Frey-Wyssling and then became a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology with James Bonner. ==Academic career==

In 1963, Birnstiel was recruited by Conrad Waddington to a faculty position in the genetics department at the University of Edinburgh, where he remained until 1972, advancing to the rank of professor. His work at Edinburgh included studying the physical properties of genes, leading to the successful purification of ribosomal RNA genes from Xenopus laevis; this body of work was performed with Ph.D. students Adrian Bird, Michael Grunstein, and Hugh Wallace and led to further study of gene structure in collaboration with Donald Brown. The work has been cited as the first purification of single genes, announced at a meeting in 1965, years prior to the isolation of the bacterial lac operon, and is noted as a key piece of evidence in establishing the chemical nature of the gene. Birnstiel served as director at the IMP until 1996, when he retired and was succeeded by Kim Nasmyth. In 2013 Intercell merged with another European biotech, Vivalis, to create a successor company Valneva that focuses on vaccine development. ==Awards and honors==

Birnstiel received numerous awards for his scientific achievements and was regarded in the 1980s as a major figure in the Swiss scientific community. • 1979: Otto Nägeli Prize • 1983: Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences • 1987: Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina • 1994: Wilhelm Exner Medal ==Personal life==

During his postdoctoral fellowship in the U.S., Birnstiel met and developed a collaboration with a British biologist, Margaret Chipchase, whom he married in 1961 and had two children with. He died in 2014 at age 81, of heart failure following radiation therapy for inoperable cancer. ==Legacy==

In 2017, the Max Birnstiel Foundation was created to promote training and career development of young researchers in the field of molecular life sciences. In 2019, the Max Birnstiel Foundation and the IMP established the Birnstiel Award for Doctoral Research in Molecular Life Sciences, which was presented for the first time in autumn 2019. ==References==