Michael Grunstein

Michael Grunstein was a Romanian-born American biologist born August 30, 1946, in Romania, and died in 2024, who worked as distinguished professor emeritus of biological chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. During postdoctoral work at Stanford he invented the colony hybridization technique for screening recombinant DNA, and his later research demonstrated that histones actively regulate gene activity in living cells rather than merely packaging DNA, laying a foundation for the field of epigenetics. He shared the Massry Prize in 2003 with Roger Kornberg and C. David Allis, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, shared the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2018 and the Albany Medical Center Prize in 2022, both with C. David Allis, and received the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2016.