Lubert Stryer

Stryer also chaired a National Research Council committee that produced a report entitled Bio2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists.

Since 1975, Stryer has authored nine editions of the textbook Biochemistry.

Stryer and coworkers pioneered the use of fluorescence spectroscopy, particularly Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET), to monitor the structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules. In 1967, Stryer and Haugland showed that the efficiency of energy transfer depends on the inverse sixth power of the distance between the donor and acceptor, as predicted by Förster's theory. They proposed that energy transfer can serve as a spectroscopic ruler to reveal proximity relationships in biological macromolecules.

Stryer received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago in 1957 and his M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School. He was a Helen Hay Whitney Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at Harvard and then at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, before joining the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford in 1963. In 1969 he moved to Yale to become Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and in 1976, he returned to Stanford to head a new Department of Structural Biology.

Lubert Stryer (born March 2, 1938, in Tianjin, China) is the Emeritus Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research over more than four decades has been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Science from President Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high density microarrays for genetic analysis, and authoring the standard undergraduate biochemistry textbook, Biochemistry. It is now in its ninth edition and also edited by Jeremy Berg, John L. Tymoczko and Gregory J. Gatto, Jr.