C. David Allis

Charles David Allis was an American molecular biologist born March 22, 1951, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died January 8, 2023, who was the Joy and Jack Fishman Professor and head of the Laboratory of Chromatin Biology and Epigenetics at Rockefeller University. In 1996 he isolated a histone acetyltransferase from the ciliate Tetrahymena, providing the first direct link between histone acetylation and the activation of DNA transcription, and in 2000 he proposed the histone code hypothesis describing how combinations of histone modifications regulate gene transcription; he went on to identify further histone-modifying enzymes and to study how mutated histones, termed oncohistones, contribute to cancer. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2018, the Japan Prize in 2014, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2015, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, and received the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2016.