Arthur Dale Riggs (August 8, 1939 – March 23, 2022)[1] was an American geneticist who worked with Genentech to express the first artificial gene in bacteria.
Riggs was a professor of biology and, in 2014, founding director of the Diabetes & Metabolism Research Institute of City of Hope National Medical Center.
[12][13] As graduate students at Caltech, he and Joel A. Huberman collaborated on work that later led to a classic paper on mammalian DNA replication, which was published in 1966.
[16] Their work resulted in another well-known series of papers on the lac repressor and bacterial gene regulation,[9][16][17][18] opening up new areas of research and theory.
[9] In 1969 Riggs joined the department of molecular biology at the City of Hope National Medical Center as an associate research scientist.
[4] Riggs continued to study the lac repressor and examined gene regulation in bacteria with Richard E. Dickerson, John Rosenberg, and Keiichi Itakura.
[9][19] Riggs and Itakura collaborated with Herbert Boyer at Genentech, and used recombinant DNA technology to become the first to produce a human protein in E.
[2][20] Following the advice of Riggs and Itakura, the group successfully produced the hormone Somatostatin in 1977 as a proof of concept before they attempted to work with the more complicated insulin molecule.
[9] Next, the group produced a synthetic gene coding for human insulin, one that was about ten times larger than the somatostatin encoding.
[2][22] In 1973, Riggs hypothesized that X chromosome inactivation might act in ways analogous to restriction enzyme complexes such as E. coli.
He eventually published a theoretical paper on the topic that correctly predicted a key mechanism for DNA methylation epigenetics.
Riggs worked with Shmuel Cabilly on "fundamental technology required for the artificial synthesis of antibody molecules.
[9] Riggs continued to work on the epigenetic programming of the cell, designing proteins that can bind to DNA in highly specified ways, wherever desired.