Randy Schekman
American cell biologist
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Related on Lably
Through DNA replication, Nature (journal) and Science (journal)
Early life and education
Schekman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Alfred Schekman, an electrical engineer and computer software designer and Esther (Bader) Schekman. His family were Jewish emigrants from Russia and Bessarabia. In the late 1950s his family moved to the new suburban community of Rossmoor, located in Orange County next to Long Beach.
He graduated from Western High School in Anaheim, California, in 1966. He received a BA in molecular biology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1971. He spent his third year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, as an exchange student. He received a PhD in 1975 from Stanford University for research on DNA replication, working with Arthur Kornberg. After joining the faculty at University of California Berkeley, he was promoted to associate professor in 1981, and professor in 1984. Schekman was married to Nancy Walls, now deceased.
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Research and career
Since 1991, Schekman has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, at the University of California, Berkeley. The Schekman Lab at that university carries out research into molecular descriptions of the process of membrane assembly and vesicular traffic in eukaryotic cells including yeast. Before that, he was a faculty member with the now disbanded Department of Biochemistry at the same university.
Open-access science
In December 2013, Schekman called for academic journal publishing reform and open access science publication by announcing that his lab at the University of California, Berkeley would no longer submit to the prestigious closed-access journals Nature, Cell, and Science, citing their self-serving and deleterious effects on science. He has criticized these journals for artificially restricting the number of publications accepted to drive up demand. In addition, Schekman says the journals accept papers that will be cited often, increasing the prestige of the journal, rather than those which demonstrate important results. He has said the prestige and difficulty of publishing in these journals sometimes cause scientists to cut corners or pursue trends, rather than conduct research on important questions. Schekman is the former editor of eLife, an open access journal and competitor to Nature, Cell, and Science. Papers are accepted into eLife based on review by working scientists. Access to accepted papers is free.
Parkinson's disease
In the fall of 2017, Schekman's wife, Nancy Walls, died after a 20-year struggle with Parkinson's disease. Near the end of this period, Schekman was enlisted to serve as the scientific director of a new effort called ASAP, aimed at organizing an international program of collaborative research on the origins and mechanisms of progression of Parkinson's disease. In cooperation with The Michael J. Fox Foundation and major philanthropic support, ASAP had grown by 2022 to involve 35 teams across 165 laboratories around the world. The goal of ASAP is bridge the talents of hundreds of scientists to develop novel insights leading to more effective treatments of this disease.