Jerzy Jurka

Who is Jerzy Jurka?

Jerzy Władysław Jurka is a Polish-American computational and molecular biologist. He is best known for his work with transposable elements, including the discovery of the major families of Alu sequences and other transposons. He also proposed the mechanism of Alu proliferation and discovered their paternal transmission. More recently, he presented a hypothesis that links the origin of repetitive families to population subdivision and speciation. Jurka served as the assistant director of research at the Linus Pauling Institute prior to founding the Genetic Information Research Institute. He has collaborated with several notable scientists including George Irving Bell, Roy Britten, Temple Smith, and Emile Zuckerkandl. His Erdős number is 3, using the path through Temple Smith and Stanislaw Ulam.