Benjamin D. Hall

Professor Emeritus of Biology and Genome Sciences. Contributed to molecular biology with several discoveries, including the first unequivocal evidence for the existence of messenger RNA (by showing that pulse-labeled RNA extracted from T2-infected E. coli cells forms RNA-DNA hybrids with T2 DNA); the first demonstration of linkages between DNA polymorphism and a phenotype trait as well as the first sequence of a mutant eukaryotic gene; and the expression of hepatitis B antigens in yeast, which provided the biotechnological foundations for the first hepatitis B vaccine.