Biography:Sean B. Carroll

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Short description: American evolutionary developmental biologist
Sean B. Carroll
Dr. Sean B. Carroll 2022.jpg
Carroll in 2022
Born (1960-09-17) September 17, 1960 (age 63)
Toledo, Ohio, US
Alma materWashington University in St. Louis (BS)
Tufts University (PhD)
AwardsPresidential Young Investigator Award
Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science
Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution
Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers
Shaw Scientist Award from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation
Scientific career
FieldsEvolutionary developmental biology, molecular biology, genetics
InstitutionsUniversity of Maryland, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Colorado at Boulder
Doctoral advisorB. David Stollar
Other academic advisorsMatthew P. Scott

Sean B. Carroll (born September 17, 1960) is an American evolutionary developmental biologist, author, educator and executive producer. He is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and professor emeritus of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His studies focus on the evolution of cis-regulatory elements in the regulation of gene expression in the context of biological development, using Drosophila as a model system. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society (2007), of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for Advancement of Science. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Carroll has received the Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, and the Lewis Thomas Prize at Rockefeller University. Awards-winning films he has produced include Emmy-winning The Farthest and The Serengeti Rules, as well as the Oscar-nominated All That Breathes.

Biography

Sean B. Carroll was born in Toledo, Ohio. He is of Irish ancestry.[1] He has stated that, as a child, he would flip over rocks looking for snakes while attending Maumee Valley Country Day School, and at age 11 or 12, he started keeping snakes. This activity led him to notice the patterns on the snakes and wonder how those form. He got his B.A. in Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, his Ph.D. in immunology from Tufts University and did post-doctoral work at the University of Colorado Boulder.[2]

Career

Carroll is at the forefront of evolutionary developmental biology (also called "evo-devo"), studying how gene changes control the evolution of body parts and patterns. He is the Allan Wilson Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.[3] In 1987, Carroll set up a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison "focused on understanding how genes get used in different ways to generate the diversity of form that we see".[2] The Laboratory of Cell and Molecular Biology lists Carroll's interests as "Genetic control of body pattern in fruit flies, butterflies, and other animals".[4] Carroll's team has shown, in a series of papers, how the activation of genes during the embryonic stages of the Drosophila fruit fly controls the development of its wings. The team has been searching for the butterfly's counterparts of these genes.[5]

In 2010, he was named vice-president for science education of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.[6] In 2011, the HHMI launched a documentary film initiative to produce science features for television, to which Carroll was appointed as one of the executive producers.[7] In 2012, Carroll founded HHMI Tangled Bank Studios.[8] In 2012, a film produced by this studio called The Day the Mesozoic Died retraced the investigation that led to the discovery of the asteroid collision that triggered the mass extinction at the end of that Era. The film was introduced by Carroll at a National Teacher's Conference.[9]

Carroll was an executive producer[10] of The Farthest, a film about the Voyager program, which won the Emmy in 2018 for outstanding science and technology documentary.[11] Carroll was an executive producer of the 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary All That Breathes,[12] which won the best documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival.[13]

Carroll is a proponent of the extended evolutionary synthesis.[14] Since 2013, Carroll has been listed on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education.[15] From September 2009 to March 2013, he wrote a column for The New York Times called "Remarkable Creatures", where he discussed findings in animal evolution.[16][17]

Awards

In 2012, he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science from the Franklin Institute "for proposing and demonstrating that the diversity and multiplicity of animal life is largely due to the different ways that the same genes are regulated rather than to mutation of the genes themselves."[2] In 2016, he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize at Rockefeller University.[18]

Selected works

Books

  • From DNA to Diversity: Molecular Genetics and the Evolution of Animal Design, with Jennifer Grenier and Scott Weatherbee (2004, Wiley-Blackwell; ISBN:978-1-4051-1950-4)
  • Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (2005, W. W. Norton & Company; ISBN:978-0-393-06016-4)
  • The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution (2006, W. W. Norton & Company; ISBN:978-0-393-06163-5)
  • Into the Jungle: Great Adventures in the Search for Evolution (2008, Benjamin Cummings; ISBN:978-0-321-55671-4)
  • Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species (2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; ISBN:978-0-15-101485-9)
  • Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize (2013, Crown; ISBN:978-0-307-95233-2)
  • The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters (2016, Princeton University Press, ISBN:978-0-691-16742-8)
  • A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (2020), Princeton University Press, ISBN:978-0-691-20175-7.

Magazine articles

  • The Origins of Form: Ancient genes, recycled and re-purposed, control embryonic development in organisms of striking diversity (2005, Natural History Magazine) [19]
  • God as Genetic Engineer. A review of Michael Behe's book "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism" (2007, Science Magazine) [20]
  • Regulating Evolution: How Gene Switches Make Life (2008, Scientific American) [21]

Filmography

Year Title Note Ref.
2017 The Farthest Emmy award, Outstanding science and technology documentary [10][11]
2018 The Serengeti Rules Emmy award, Best nature documentary [22][23]
2019 Oliver Sacks: His Own Life [24]
2022 All That Breathes [13][25]

Reception

Science writer Peter Forbes, writing in The Guardian , calls Endless Forms Most Beautiful an "essential book" and its author "both a distinguished scientist ... and one of our great science writers." In Forbes's view, in The Serengeti Rules Carroll "manages to unite natural history with the hard science of genomics."[26] In her article on Science Based Medicine titled The Essential Role of Regulation In Human Health and In Ecology: The Serengeti Rules, Harriet A. Hall says "This book is a great way to learn about the rules of regulation and about how science works. It's not just a painless way to learn, its positively fun."[27] The documentary film, The Serengeti Rules, was released in 2018 and is based on Carroll's book.[28]

Louise S. Mead, reviewing The Making of the Fittest for the National Center for Science Education, notes that Carroll describes "some of the overwhelming evidence for evolution provided in DNA", using different lines of inquiry such as DNA sequences that code for genes no longer in use, and evidence of evolutionary change. Mead notes that evolutionary theory has predictive power, as with icefish whose ancestors had hemoglobin; as they no longer need it in their icy environment, they have lost it.[29]

Douglas H. Erwin, reviewing Endless Forms Most Beautiful for Artificial Life, remarks that life forms from Drosophila to man have far fewer genes than many biologists expected – in man's case, only some 20,000, which is about the same as a fly. He notes the "astonishing morphological diversity" of animals coming from "such a limited number of genes". He praises Carroll's "insightful and enthusiastic" style, writing in a "witty and engaging" way, pulling the reader into the complexities of Hox and PAX-6, as well as celebrating the Cambrian explosion of life forms, and much else.[30]

References

  1. ↑ "117 | Sean B. Carroll on Randomness and the Course of Evolution – Sean Carroll". https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/10/05/117-sean-b-carroll-on-randomness-and-the-course-of-evolution/. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science". Franklin Institute. 2012. https://www.fi.edu/laureates/sean-b-carroll. 
  3. ↑ "Our Scientists". Howard Hughes Medical Institute. http://www.hhmi.org/scientists/sean-b-carroll. 
  4. ↑ "LCMB Investigators". http://molbio.wisc.edu/LCMB-Faculty. 
  5. ↑ Wade, Nicholas (July 5, 1994). "How Nature Makes a Butterfly's Wing". The New York Times: p. C9. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/05/science/how-nature-makes-a-butterfly-s-wing.html. 
  6. ↑ "Sean B. Carroll, HHMI Vice President for Science Education". Howard Hughes Medical Institute. http://www.hhmi.org/about/carroll.html. 
  7. ↑ "HHMI Launches Documentary Film Unit to Create Science Features for Television". Howard Hughes Medical Institute. http://www.hhmi.org/news/hhmi-launches-documentary-film-unit-create-science-features-television. 
  8. ↑ Walsh, Barry (10 December 2020). "HHMI Tangled Bank Studios' Sean Carroll talks new vaccine doc, taking on denialism". https://realscreen.com/2020/12/10/hhmi-tangled-bank-studios-sean-carroll-talks-new-vaccine-doc-taking-on-denialism/. 
  9. ↑ "HHMI Premieres New Film Showcasing One of Science's Greatest Detective Stories". Howard Hughes Medical Institute. http://www.hhmi.org/news/hhmi-premieres-new-film-showcasing-one-sciences-greatest-detective-stories. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 McNary, Dave (2 August 2017). "Voyager Mission Documentary 'The Farthest' Lands August Release". Variety. https://variety.com/2017/film/festivals/voyager-mission-documentary-the-farthest-us-release-1202513475/. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Falvey, Deirdre (2 October 2018). "Irish film 'The Farthest' wins Emmy for outstanding science documentary". The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/irish-film-the-farthest-wins-emmy-for-outstanding-science-documentary-1.3649255. 
  12. ↑ Cho, Aimee (2 March 2023). "UMD Professor Up for Best Documentary Academy Award". NBC 4. https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/umd-professor-up-for-best-documentary-academy-award/3291129/. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 French, Kristen (20 December 2022). "The Human Story at the Heart of Science". Nautilus. https://nautil.us/the-human-story-at-the-heart-of-science-253711/. 
  14. ↑ Carroll, Sean B. (2008). "Evo-Devo and an Expanding Evolutionary Synthesis: A Genetic Theory of Morphological Evolution". Cell 134 (1): 25–36. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2008.06.030. PMID 18614008. 
  15. ↑ "Advisory Council". National Center for Science Education. https://ncse.com/about/advisory-council. 
  16. ↑ Carroll, Sean B (September 15, 2009). "In a Shark's Tooth, a New Family Tree". https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/science/15creature.html. 
  17. ↑ Carroll, Sean B. (March 11, 2013). "Solving the Puzzles of Mimicry in Nature". https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/science/solving-the-puzzles-of-mimicry-in-nature.html. 
  18. ↑ "Presentation of the 2016 Lewis Thomas Prize to Sean B. Carroll". The Rockefeller University. https://giveandjoin.rockefeller.edu/events/lewis-thomas/2016. 
  19. ↑ Carroll, Sean B.. "The Origins of Form". http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/061488/the-origins-of-form. 
  20. ↑ Carroll, Sean B. (June 8, 2007). "God as Genetic Engineer". Science Magazine 316 (5830): 1427–1428. doi:10.1126/science.1145104. 
  21. ↑ "Regulating Evolution: How Gene Switches Make Life". May 2008. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/regulating-evolution/.  (Preview)
  22. ↑ Walsh, Barry (10 December 2020). "HHMI Tangled Bank Studios' Sean Carroll talks new vaccine doc, taking on denialism". Realscreen. https://realscreen.com/2020/12/10/hhmi-tangled-bank-studios-sean-carroll-talks-new-vaccine-doc-taking-on-denialism/. 
  23. ↑ Defore, John (8 May 2019). "'The Serengeti Rules': Film Review". The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/serengeti-rules-1208985/. 
  24. ↑ Gleiberman, Owen (1 October 2019). "New York Film Review: 'Oliver Sacks: His Own Life'". Variety. https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/oliver-sacks-his-own-story-review-1203355190/. 
  25. ↑ Kroll, Justin (16 February 2023). "'All That Breathes' Director Shaunak Sen Signs With WME And Entertainment 360". Deadline. https://deadline.com/2023/02/all-that-breathes-shaunak-sen-entertainment-360-wme-1235260265/. 
  26. ↑ Forbes, Peter (March 23, 2016). "The Serengeti Rules by Sean B Carroll review – a visionary book about how life works". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/23/the-serengeti-rules-sean-b-carroll-review. 
  27. ↑ Hall, Harriet (March 2016). "The Essential Role of Regulation In Human Health and In Ecology: The Serengeti Rules". https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-essential-role-of-regulation-in-human-health-and-in-ecology-the-serengeti-rules/. 
  28. ↑ Regan, Chelsea (April 7, 2019). "PBS International & HHMI Tangled Bank Partner on Science Docs". https://worldscreen.com/tvreal/pbs-international-hhmi-tangled-bank-partner-on-science-docs/. 
  29. ↑ Mead, Louise S. (2008). "Review: The Making of the Fittest". Reports of the National Center for Science Education 28 (1): 37–39. http://ncse.com/rncse/28/1/review-making-fittest. Retrieved April 15, 2016. 
  30. ↑ Erwin, Douglas J. (2007). "Book Review: Endless Forms Most Beautiful". Artificial Life 13 (1): 87–89. doi:10.1162/artl.2007.13.1.87. 

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