Piotr Słonimski | |
|---|---|
 Piotr Słominski | |
| Born | (1922-11-09)November 9, 1922 |
| Died | April 25, 2009(2009-04-25) (aged 86) |
| Nationality | French |
| Education | Jagiellonian University Sorbonne University |
| Known for | Work onmitochondrialgenetics |
| Relatives | Antoni Słonimski (uncle) |
| Awards | Mendel Medal (1989) CNRS Gold medal (1985) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Genetics |
| Institutions | CNRS |
| Doctoral advisor | Boris Ephrussi |
Piotr Słonimski (November 9, 1922, inWarsaw – April 25, 2009, inParis) was a Polish-born French geneticist, pioneer of yeast mitochondrial genetics, nephew of the Polish poetAntoni Słonimski.
Słonimski was born inWarsaw in 1922 and he finished "underground" studies of medicine duringWorld War II in occupied Poland. He was a member of the Polish resistance movement and theArmia Krajowa, and he fought during theWarsaw Uprising. According to his own account,[1] he became interested withgenetics when he discovered, among ruins of a German police station and while performing an act of sabotage, a German book on the experiments ofGeorge Wells Beadle andBoris Ephrussi.
After the war, he finished medical studies at theJagiellonian University inKraków. In 1947, Słonimski emigrated and settled in France, as members ofArmia Krajowa were prosecuted by the newly established communist government in Poland. Once in Paris, he joined the group ofBoris Ephrussi atSorbonne University and started working in the field of genetics. In 1952 he obtained his Ph.D.
Between 1971 and 1991, Słonimski was the director of Centre de Génétique Moléculaire of the FrenchCNRS inGif-sur-Yvette.
Słonimski never broke the contacts with his home country, Poland. Since 1980, he was heading the Solidarité France-Pologne, organizing aid for Poland.[2] He frequently hosted Polish intelectualists and dissidents, such asAdam Michnik,Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Maria andLeszek Kołakowski. Whenmartial law was introduced in Poland in 1981, he organized financial support for scientists repressed by the government.[3] The money was smuggled and distributed in Poland by two Polish couriers:Wacław Gajewski, a professor of genetics, and Władysław Kunicki-Goldfinger, a professor of microbiology.[3] Słonimski gave them the code names "Eukaryote" and "Prokaryote", as Gajewski was working onfungi, and Kunicki-Goldfinger was a microbiologist.
Piotr Słonimski did pioneering work on yeast mitochondrial genetics.[1] He was one of the first to show that genetic information is passed outside of the nucleus in mitochondria,[4] and his subsequent, much cited work led to establishment of the field of mitochondrial genomics. In 1980, he discovered that some parts of theintrons in yeast mitochondria encode an enzyme—which he called amaturase—that aids the splicing and the maturation of mRNA.[5]
