page_title: George Streisinger
section_title: Personal History
hierarchical_section_title: George Streisinger / Personal History
caption_attribution_description: Magyar: Monte Westerfield-George Streisinger 10th European ZebraFish Meeting, Budapest, Hungary 3-7 July 2017.
context_page_description: George Streisinger was an American molecular biologist at the University of Oregon. He was the first person to clone a vertebrate, cloning zebra fish in his University of Oregon laboratory. He also pioneered work in the genetics of the T-even bacterial viruses. In 1972, along with William Franklin Dove he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship award, and in 1975 he was selected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the second Oregonian to receive the distinction. The University of Oregon's Institute of Molecular Biology named their main building "Streisinger Hall" in his honor.
context_section_description: George Streisinger was born in Budapest, Hungary, on December 27, 1927. Because they were Jewish, in 1937, his family left Budapest for New York to escape Nazi persecution. Streisinger attended New York public schools and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1944. He obtained a B.S. degree from Cornell University in 1950, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1953. He completed postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology from 1953 to 1956. He married Lotte Sielman in 1949. Streisinger accepted a post at the University of Oregon Institute of Molecular Biology in Eugene in 1960.
  Streisinger was well known as an innovative professor in and out of the classroom, conscripting a dance class to illustrate protein synthesis, and often requested beginning and non-major biology students. He was very politically active, organizing grass-roots resistance to the Vietnam war and legislative opposition to John Kennedy's civil defense program. He testified to successfully ban mutagenic herbicides in Douglas fir reforestation, and led and won a battle to exclude secret war department research from the University of Oregon campus.
  His wife, Lotte, was a noted artist and community activist, and the founder of the Eugene Saturday Market, the inspiration for the Portland Oregon Saturday Market.
caption: Monte Westerfield-George Streisinger at the 10th European ZebraFish Meeting, Budapest, Hungary 3-7 July 2017.
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