Benjamin D. Hall

Benjamin Downs Hall was an American human genetics researcher. He was professor of genetics and botany at the University of Washington. Hall is best known for developing methods for producing vaccines and other bio-pharmecuticals using transgenic yeast.

Biography Hall was born in Berkeley, California. His family moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1944. There he met his future wife, Margaret Ann Black, in the 7th grade. Hall and Margaret married before departing for Munich, Germany under the support of Hall's Fulbright Scholarship. After accepting a faculty appointment at the University of Illinois in 1958, Hall conducted studies of the RNA generated by T4 phage when infecting E. coli. By developing molecular hybridization techniques, his lab demonstrated that such RNAs had complementary sequences to those of the bacteriophage DNA,

In 1963 Hall joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at the University of Washington. Hall's subsequent accomplishments included the first demonstration of linkage between a DNA polymorphism and a phenotype, the discovery of tRNA introns, and production of the first DNA sequence of a mutant eukaryotic gene.

Hall's group also conducted studies of transcription by S. cerevisiae RNA Polymerases, Based on these findings, Hall and colleagues developed methods for the expression of genetically engineered proteins in yeast.

Later in his career Hall studied the molecular systematics, taxonomy, and evolutionary history of fungi and flowering plants, In collaboration with Jay Shendure’s laboratory, Hall's group determined the genome sequence of the Rhododendron species R. williamsianum.

The Benjamin D. Hall Interdisciplinary Research Building at the University of Washington was dedicated in Hall's honor in 2006. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2010 National Academy of Sciences, 2014