Werner Arber

Werner Arber married Antonia in 1966.

They have two daughters, Silvia and Caroline, who were born in 1968 and 1974 respectively.

Werner Arber was born on June 3, 1929 in Granichen, in the Canton of Aargau in Switzerland.

He studied at the public schools in Granichen until he was 16.

He next joined the gymnasium at the ‘Kantonsschule Aarau’ from where he received a B-type maturity in 1949.

He then enrolled at the ‘Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’ located in Zurich under the ‘University of Geneva’ and studied physics and chemistry for his diploma in ‘Natural Sciences’ from 1949 to 1953. During the last part of his studies he first became interested in fundamental research while trying to isolate an isomer and study its characteristics.

In November 1953 he took up the job of an assistant for electron microscopy at the ‘Biophysics Laboratory’ at the ‘University of Geneva’. He helped to keep the two electron microscopes in good working condition and spent a lot of time helping in the preparation of biological specimens to be viewed with the microscopes. While doing this he became familiar with the basic issues related to genetics and the physiology of ‘bacteriophages’.

Werner Arber and some more scientists had already started work on the findings of another Nobel laureate named Salvador Luria during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Luria had found that the viruses that infect bacteria known as ‘bacteriophages’ are themselves affected by hereditary mutations while inducing hereditary mutations in their hosts. His work was centered mainly on the protective nature of some of the enzymes in the bacteria that prevent the growth of the ‘bacteriophages’.

He received an offer from the ‘University of Southern California’ in Los Angeles in the summer of 1958 after completing his PhD to work with Joe Bertani who had collaborated earlier with Jean Weigle in the research on ‘bacteriophages’. Arber started to work with Joe Bertani on a ‘bacteriophage’ of the E. Coli virus which Bertani had isolated a few years earlier.

He received many offers from various laboratories for post-doctoral work as his doctoral thesis was highly appreciated by the genetics fraternity. He was also invited by Eduard Kellenberger to return to Geneva for research on the effect of radiation on micro-organisms.

Before returning to Geneva at the beginning of 1960, he spent a few weeks working at the ‘Gunther Stent’ laboratory in Berkeley, the ‘Joshua Lederberg’ laboratory in Stanford and the ‘Salvador Luria’ laboratory at the ‘Massachusetts Institute of Technology’ in Cambridge.

After returning to Geneva he started working on the bacteriophage of E.Coli. Within a year of research he was able to establish the fact that DNA of both the ‘bacteriophage’ and the cell had been affected by modification and strain-specific restrictions.

Werner Arber received the ‘Plantamour-Prevost’ prize from the ‘University of Geneva’ in 1962.

Werner Arber was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978.