Robert Waterston biography 1/6/04. By Georgina Ferry Robert Waterston was born in 1943 in Michigan, USA. He went to Princeton as an undergraduate where he majored in engineering while spending as much time as possible studying the humanities; he wrote his final year dissertation on the plays of Eugene O'Neill. By this time he was thinking of switching to medicine but had never studied biology.

While on what we might now call a 'gap year' visit to Germany he took courses in biology – in German – and returned to take up a place at the school of medicine in Chicago.

By 1972 he had acquired both MD and PhD degrees, and a taste for research: "I was more interested in advancing medicine than going into practice," he says. A chance meeting with Sydney Brenner on a physiology summer school at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in 1969 had introduced him to the grand project then beginning at the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge: to understand life at the molecular level through studying the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. At the earliest possible opportunity, Waterston left for Cambridge to become the third American post doctoral researcher to join Brenner's group.

Brenner was looking for worms with mutations that affected their ability to move, as part of the search for genes controlling the nervous system and muscles. Waterston took on the task of looking at the molecular level for abnormalities in the muscle mutants, and within a few years had made discoveries that led to the cloning of genes for two important muscle proteins.

He returned to the USA in 1976 as an assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology, and set up a lab dedicated to studying the molecular biology of muscle in the worm. There, he and his colleagues identified many more muscle genes and investigated their role in muscle assembly and contraction, as well as discovering and analysing the function of novel sequences in worm DNA and RNA.A few years later he moved to the department of genetics, where he later became chair.

In the mid-1980s he made a sabbatical visit to the LMB, ostensibly to continue his work with Brenner. But the only space available was in the room where John Sulston and Alan Coulson were beginning to map the worm genome. Waterston joined them, and after his return to St Louis the worm map became a collaborative project between the two labs.

In 1989, one of the first Human Genome Project grants went to Waterston and Sulston to begin the sequencing of the worm genome. They were so successful that at the same time that the Wellcome Trust established the Sanger Centre with Sulston at its head, Waterston received funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute to undertake large-scale human sequencing at his St Louis lab. The partnership became the first to complete the sequence of a multicellular organism when the worm genome was published in December 1998, and both labs played key roles in the sequencing of the human genome.

Like John Sulston, Bob Waterston has always been committed to the free release of scientific information, and he was an influential voice in establishing the Bermuda Principles on data sharing in 1996. In the past few years they have jointly won numerous awards for their scientific work and their support for the scientific community, including the Gairdner Award, the General Motors prize and the George W Beadle medal of the Genetics Society of America.

In January 2003, Waterston moved from St Louis to take up the chair of a new Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. As William Gates III Professor of Biomedical Sciences, he is leading research into the genetic control of development in the nematode, and using comparative genomics to understand the function of human genes.