Charles Yanofsky (April 17, 1925[1] – March 16, 2018) was an American geneticist on the faculty of Stanford University who contributed to the establishment of the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis and discovered attenuation, a riboswitch mechanism in which messenger RNA changes shape in response to a small molecule and thus alters its binding ability for the regulatory region of a gene or operon.
[2] He was one of the earliest graduates of the Bronx High School of Science,[3] then studied at the City College of New York and completed his degree in biochemistry in spite of having had his education interrupted by military service in World War II including participation in the Battle of the Bulge.
His graduate student Iwona Stroynowski and Mitzi Kuroda discovered the process of attenuation of expression based on regulated binding ability of the five-prime untranslated region of the messenger RNA for the bacterial tryptophan operon.
They showed that this mechanism applied to other amino acid biosynthesis and degradation operons of bacteria and to animal cell genes.
[2] Charles Yanofsky received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, sometimes referred to as the American Nobel prize, in 1971.