Ray Wu

Ray Jui Wu was a Chinese-born American geneticist and served as Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Molecular Genetics and Biology at Cornell University. He was widely recognized as one of the fathers of plant genetic engineering, from which sprang the development of widely grown rice plants resistant to pests, drought and salt. He was also a pioneer in DNA sequencing and created the first approach for DNA sequencing in 1970, earlier than the methods of Frederick Sanger and Walter Gilbert. His contributions on DNA sequencing are fundamental to the general sequencing methods today. He was also an active educator and a scientific adviser to the governments of both China and Taiwan. He created the CUSBEA (China-US Biochemistry Examination and Application) program, which brought over 400 students from China to pursue Ph.D. degrees in the US in the 1980s. He also donated US $500,000 to establish the Ray Wu Graduate Fellowship in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell to support biology graduate students. He was an Academician of Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. One of his former students, Jack W. Szostak, was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He died of cardiac arrest at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca on February 10, 2008, at the age of 79.