Michael Levine is an American developmental and cell biologist at Princeton University, where he is the Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and a Professor of Molecular Biology.
[6] There, he co-discovered the homeobox with Ernst Hafen and fellow post-doc William McGinnis:[7] After learning that Ultrabithorax, a gene that specifies the development of wings, showed a localized pattern of expression similar to that of Antennapedia, they decided to revisit the classic papers of Ed Lewis.
[3] Joseph Corbo said of the work, "Before Levine's studies of even-skipped stripe 2, it wasn't clear how you generated spatially restricted patterns of gene expression from initially broad crude gradients of morphogens.
"[3]After earning tenure in only four years at Columbia,[3] Levine moved to UCSD in 1991,[4] where he added the sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis, to his repertoire.
[13] Levine cites as a significant influence his instructor Fred Wilt (taking his developmental biology class "was probably the single most galvanizing experience I had in terms of defining my future goals"),[8] and cites fellow scientists Eric Davidson, Peter Lawrence and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard as "mentors [and] friends ... over the years".
[8] On choosing to become a research biologist, he described some family pressure to become a doctor ("Coming from a modest background, particularly a Jewish family, the pressure to become a doctor was intense"),[3] Fellow biologist Sean Carroll said of Levine, "Mike's work has done for animal development what the work on the lac operon and phage lambda did for understanding gene regulation in simpler organisms ... [Those] two big discoveries had a very large conceptual significance for developmental biology and by extension for evolutionary biology.