Biographie de Terence A. Brown
I became fascinated with the natural world when I was very young. I began my research career studying the effects of metal pollution on microorganisms and the tolerance that some plants display to high concentrations of toxic metals. I then became excited by DNA and worked on mitochondrial genes in fungi in order to learn the new (in those days) techniques for gene cloning and DNA sequencing. I contributed to the discovery of mitochondrial introns and to work that described the base-paired structure of these introns.
I then became interested in ancient DNA and was one of the first people to carry out DNA extractions with bones and preserved plant remains. This work has required close collaboration with archaeologists, and has led to my current interests in paleogenomics, the origins of agriculture, and the evolution of domesticated plants. I obtained my PhD from University College London in 1977 and then worked in New York, Oxford, Colchester, and Manchester before beginning in 1984 as a Lecturer in Biotechnology at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).
I was appointed Professor of Biomolecular Archaeology in 2000 and was Head of Biomolecular Sciences at UMIST from 2002-2004. I was then Associate Dean in the Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Manchester until 2006, before taking a break from administration in order to have more time to do research. My other undergraduate textbooks include Introduction Genetics, A Molecular Approach (Garland Science).
