David Botstein

David Botstein was an American geneticist and genomicist born September 8, 1942, in Zurich, Switzerland, and died February 27, 2026, in Palo Alto, California, at age eighty three, who directed the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University from 2003 to 2013 and served as founding chief science officer of Calico, the Google-founded company researching aging. In 1980 he co-developed a method using restriction fragment length polymorphisms for genetic linkage mapping, a technique that enabled identification of disease genes including those for Huntington disease and BRCA1 and laid groundwork for the Human Genome Project, and in 1998 he created statistical and visualization methods for interpreting microarray data that were widely adopted for tumor classification. He also co-founded the Gene Ontology framework for standardizing biological data annotation. He received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2013 and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal in 2020, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981.