Allan C. Spradling

Allan C. Spradling is an American geneticist born in 1949 who is a staff member of the Carnegie Institution for Science and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, with an adjunct appointment at Johns Hopkins University. In the early 1980s, working with Gerald M. Rubin, he pioneered the use of P element transposons to introduce genetic material into the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a technique that became a standard tool of fly genetics, and his laboratory has also studied stem cells and the genetics of egg development in the fruit fly ovary. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989 and received the George W. Beadle Award in 2003, the Edwin Grant Conklin Medal in 2003, and the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2008.