Denis Hochstrasser

Denis Hochstrasser, Professor of University of Geneva, Switzerland. He started physics and medicine together and finished his M.D. degree in Geneva, Switzerland. He was a visiting medical student at Duke University and did my internship and residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in internal medicine. Then he came back to Geneva as chief resident in internal medicine. In 1983, his boss, the chairman of medicine, said that he should pursue an academic career. At that time he wanted to work on proteins and computer sciences. He felt that we wouldn't be competitive enough in Geneva to work on DNA at that time, when other people were thinking of sequencing the entire human genome on an industrial scale. He felt that it would be more critical to work on protein separation and using computers to analyze the data, because when the genome would be known, the analysis of its expression would become essential.He started to work on 2-D gels as a protein separation technique. Then he worked on imaging, using computers to analyze the 2-D gel images. Quite progressively, we got some interesting results, and he was invited to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a guest researcher where he worked for more than a year.