Lynn Caporale

Lynn Helena Caporale is an American biochemist, author and independent scholar of biology known for her work on the molecular mechanisms of genome variation and their relationship to natural selection. She has argued that the mechanisms by which genetic variation is generated are themselves subject to natural selection, such that genomes have evolved to increase the probability of adaptive mutations.

Education Caporale is of Italian and Eastern European descent, she received a B.S. with honors in chemistry from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973.

She subsequently spent over a decade at Merck & Co., as a Senior Director, establishing scientific collaborations with international pharmaceutical companies and research institutions. She has also taught genetics and biomedical topics at Columbia University, St. John's University, and City University of New York. Examples discussed include mutational hot spots in cone snail toxin genes and the antibody diversity-generating machinery of the vertebrate immune system.

The Implicit Genome (2006) Caporale edited this compilation for Oxford University Press, bringing together various contributions arguing that genomes contain forms of information beyond the linear nucleotide sequence.