Charles Yanofsky

Charles Yanofsky helped establish the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis, the foundational idea that a gene's job is to encode a single protein, through his work on tryptophan biosynthesis at Stanford. He went on to discover attenuation, a mechanism by which a strand of messenger RNA can fold in response to a small molecule and switch a gene's regulatory region on or off, a discovery that reshaped how biologists understood gene regulation beyond the classical on/off switch model.