Michael Ashburner FRS MAE[11] (23 May 1942 – 7 July 2023) was an English biologist and Professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge.

[8][21][22][23][24][25][26] Ashburner's career began in the early period of molecular biology prior to the development of most of the recombinant DNA techniques in use today, such as Northern/Southern/Western blotting.

Nevertheless, by observing patterns of "puffing" in polytene chromosomes,[21] he established the existence of a cascade of genetic controls in the post-larval development triggered by ecdysone.

[30][31][32][33] A prolonged effort by his laboratory to characterise the Adh region[22] became invaluable for validating annotation strategies when large-scale genome information became available.

[51][52][53] He also provided written evidence to the UK Parliament Select Committee on Science and Technology supporting Open Access publishing[54] and served on the initial advisory board of UK PubMed Central,[55] the first global mirror site of the PubMed Central repository of freely available biological literature.

Combining genetic, cytological and molecular methodology, he has investigated in fine detail particular chromosome regions, especially that surrounding the Adh (alcohol dehydrogenase) gene, revealing many novel features of structure and function.