Paul Schimmel

Paul Schimmel is a Professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute. Prior to joining The Scripps Research Institute, he was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Author or coauthor of many scientific research publications, he is also coauthor of a widely used 3-volume textbook on biophysical chemistry. His research interests have focused on aminoacyl tRNA synthetases as fundamental interpreters of the genetic information. Through career-long investigations of this ancient and universal set of essential enzymes, his laboratory has worked on a universal mechanism for correcting errors in the interpretation of genetic information, and went on to show how this mechanism is essential for maintaining cellular homeostasis and for preventing serious pathologies and disease. He has also been listed as one of the leading translational researchers in the world, having one of the top five most cited patents for the period 2012-2016.

His laboratory also discovered what others have referred to as a tRNA synthetase-directed primordial, or 'second', genetic code that eventually was incorporated into the modern code. In a separate line of research published back in 1983, Schimmel developed the concept of what are now known as ESTs (expressed sequence tags) and the strategy of shotgun sequencing, approaches that several years later were adopted for the human genome project. Nature magazine listed Schimmel's work on the development of ESTs as one of the four key developments that launched the human genome project. Lastly, his laboratory established connections of synthetases to disease and, most recently, they reported the structural and functional metamorphosis of these proteins, whereby they are repurposed with novel activities, both inside and outside the cell, in a variety of cell signaling pathways