Brief Biography
Peter H. Seeburg graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and obtained his Ph.D. in Genetics at the same University in 1975. Around that time, the first gene splicing experiments were underway in Stanford and San Francisco, and Seeburg joined the labs of Herb Boyer and Howard Goodman at the University of California in San Franscisco (UCSF) to genetically program bacteria into producing a human hormone. He succeeded in isolating rat and human cDNA encoding pituitary growth hormone (somatotropin) and showed that this hormone can be made in E. coli. In 1978, he joined the fledgling biotech company, Genentech, to turn bacterially produced growth hormone into becoming the first recombinant therapeutic protein. His interest then turned to hypothalamic GnRH neurons and their control of pituitary gonadotrophs. In 1987, he obtained a professorship at the Center for Molecular Biology (ZMBH) at Heidelberg University in Germany and, in 1996, became Director of the Department of Molecular Neurobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. His lab elucidated the molecular and functional complexity of GABA-A receptors, the main inhibitory receptor channels in the central nervous system and, in collaboration with Bert Sakmann’s lab, determined the molecular and functional subtypes of ionotropic glutamate receptors mediating fast excitatory synaptic neurotransmission. His current work generates gene-targeted mice expressing functionally altered glutamate-gated channels to study the role of glutamate receptor subtypes in hippocampal synaptic plasticity and spatial learning.