WSBS Professor, Editorial Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
Ph.D., University of Edinburgh, 1989

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After receiving my undergraduate degree from University College London, I spent most of the next ten years engaged in research. Those research years were spent first in Edinburgh, where I obtained my Ph.D. working on restriction enzymes with Noreen Murray; then, at Harvard, where I worked on mechanisms of gene regulation with Mark Ptashne; and finally, back at UCL, on newt limb regeneration with Jeremy Brockes. This led to a job as lecturer in Developmental Biology at Lancaster University (in the North of England) where, in addition to pursuing my interests in both regeneration and transcriptional regulation, I taught undergraduates.

Throughout, I have been intrigued by scientific publishing. This fascination began as soon as I encountered my first textbooks -- and noted the contrast between those that inspired and those that didn't -- and persisted as I was exposed to research journals and professional scientific publications. Indeed, reading the books and journals always brought me greater satisfaction than performing experiments. This preference led me to the journal Nature where I worked as an assistant biology editor for a year in 1991, and, more recently, to Cold Spring Harbor where, since 1999, I have been engaged in acquiring and developing a range of lab manuals, monographs and textbooks. I am also coauthor of the book Genes and Signals (with Mark Ptashne), and the 5th and 6th editions of Molecular Biology of the Gene (with James Watson and others).Another keen interest is in the history of molecular biology.  As well as some recent papers on this topic listed below, I also edited (with Jan Witkowski and Joe Sambrook) the book Life Illuminated: selected papers from Cold Spring Harbor 1972–1994.

 

Selected Publications

Gann, A., and Witkowski, J.A. 2010. The Lost Correspondence Of Francis Crick.  Nature 467: 519–524.

Gann, A. 2010. Jacob and Monod: From Operons To EvoDevo. Curr. Biol. 20: 718–723.

Murray, N.E., and Gann, A. 2007. What has phage lambda ever done for us? Curr. Biol. 17: 305–312.