Messing Elected to National Academy of Inventors
Joachim Messing, director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology and Distinguished Professor of Microbiology, is a 2018 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. To be named fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors. Messing is well known for creating a genetic engineering technique used in laboratories to create plants that have produced disease-resistant crops considered crucial to feeding the world’s population and drugs like erythropoietin (EPO) used to treat cancer patients.
When he discovered a way to crack the genetic code of humans and plants like rice, corn and wheat, Messing did not patent his work. Instead, he gave away the tools he invented – for free – to his fellow scientists around the world because he believed it was vital for future research. His decision enabled his colleagues to further decipher the genetic blueprint of living cells, which revolutionized medicine and agriculture.
He received the 2013 Wolf Prize in Agriculture “for innovations in recombinant DNA cloning, which revolutionized agriculture and for deciphering the genetic codes of crop plants.” The American Society of Microbiology recognized Messing with the prestigious Promega Biotechnology Award in 2014 for “his significant contributions to the start of the genomics revolution.” Messing has published more than 250 articles and two textbooks and serves as editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, executive editor for Gene and is on the editorial board of various prestigious journals. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences. In 2016, Rutgers created the Joachim Messing Endowed Chair in Molecular Genetics.
Messing will be inducted at the Eighth NAI Annual Meeting at the Space Center in Houston, Texas, on April 11, 2019.