Jaenisch’s first breakthrough occurred in 1974 when he and Beatrice Mintz showed that foreign DNA could be integrated into the DNA of early mouse embryos. They injected retrovirus DNA into early mouse embryos and showed that leukemia DNA sequences had integrated the mouse genome and also to its offspring. These mice were the first transgenic mammals in history.
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Jaenisch received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Munich in 1967. He was head of the Department of Tumor Virology at the Heinrich Pette Institute at the University of Hamburg. He has co-authored more than 300 research papers and has received numerous prizes and recognitions including an appointment to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. He is currently a member of the Whitehead Institute and a Biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He participated in the 2004 science conference on human cloning at the United Nations and serves on the science advisory boards of the Genetics Policy Institute and Stemgent.