Boris Ephrussi

Boris Ephrussi (Russian: Борис Самойлович Эфрусси; 9 May 1901 – 2 May 1979), Professor of Genetics at the University of Paris, was a Russo-French geneticist.

His father, Samuel Osipovich Ephrussi, was a chemical engineer; his grandfather, Joseph Ephrusi (Efrusi), was the founder of a banking dynasty in Kishinev.

A major strand of his early research concerned the effect of temperature on the development of fertilized sea urchin eggs.

He began working at the Institut de biologie physico-chimique (the Rothschild Institute) in Paris, and later worked at the CNRS at Gif-sur-Yvette, where he studied the contribution of cytoplasm to the cell phenotype and pursued the interactions between nuclear and cytoplasmic genetic endowments necessary to the yielding of an intact, functioning (albeit single-celled) organism.

[4] Boris Ephrussi was a pioneer in questioning the consensus at the time that heredity could be accounted for exclusively by nuclear genes.

Topics covered included In 1974 Ephrussi won a Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.