Zaitlin was born on April 2, 1927, in
Mt. Vernon, New York. He was an undergraduate at the
University of California, Berkeley, from which he received his bachelor's degree in
plant pathology in 1949. After a brief period conducting research at the
California Institute of Technology, he attended the
University of California, Los Angeles, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1954 under the supervision of
Samuel G. Wildman. He spent four years working as a research officer for
CSIRO in Australia before returning to the United States to work at the
University of Missouri in
Columbia. In 1960, Zaitlin joined the faculty at the
University of Arizona in the Department of Agricultural Biochemistry, where he remained until 1973. During this period he was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship and
Fulbright scholarship, which supported a return to CSIRO in Australia. He moved to
Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York, in 1973 and remained there until his retirement, assuming
professor emeritus status, in 1997. ==Research==