Joseph Frank Sambrook (1 March 1939 – 14 June 2019) was a British molecular biologist known for his studies of DNA oncoviruses and the molecular biology of normal and cancerous cells.
Education and early career
Sambrook was educated at the University of Liverpool (BSc (hons) 1962) and obtained his PhD at the Australian National University in 1966. He did postdoctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (1966–67) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1967–69). In 1969 he was hired by James D. Watson to work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Watson has been reported to say this was the best hiring decision he ever made. Joe was responsible for creating a combative creative environment at CSHL that fomented discovery. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas). He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2000. and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was the founder and director of the Kathleen Cunningham Consortium for research into familial breast cancer, KConFab, that was established in 1995.
Sambrook has published four editions of the best-selling, highly influential laboratory manual Molecular Cloning, the third in 2001 with David Russell and the fourth in 2012 with Michael R. Green. He is also co-editor of Inspiring Science: Jim Watson and the Age of DNA and Life Illuminated: Selected Papers from Cold Spring Harbor Volume 2, 1972–1994. All three books were published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
In 2009 he was awarded the "Victorian Government Leadership and Innovation Award".
Personal life
Sambrook had three children from his first marriage to Thelma, and a daughter with his second wife, Professor Mary-Jane Gething.