Maynard Olson

Maynard Victor Olson is an American chemist and molecular biologist born October 2, 1943, in Bethesda, Maryland, who became a professor in the department of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington after earlier work at Washington University in St Louis, where he specialized in cystic fibrosis genetics. He developed yeast artificial chromosomes, a technique for cloning and studying large segments of the human genome that became foundational to the Human Genome Project, and he later led sequencing of the genome of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994, received the Genetics Society of America Medal in 1992, and received the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2007.