John Shine

Who is John Shine?

Professor John Shine AO is an Australian biochemist; he discovered the nucleotide sequence, called the Shine-Dalgarno sequence, necessary for the initiation and termination of protein synthesis. He directed the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia from 1990 - 2011.

Shine was born in Brisbane in 1946. He completed his university studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, graduating with a bachelor of science with honours in 1972 and completing his PhD in 1975. During the course of his studies he discovered the RNA sequence necessary for ribosome binding and the initiation of protein synthesis in the bacterium Escherichia coli. The sequence was named the Shine-Dalgarno sequence. This was a key discovery allowing further development of molecular biology, especially genetic engineering, and was an important discovery towards understanding gene expression and regulation.

Shine undertook post doctoral research at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, during this period he was the first to clone a human hormone gene and was a central figure in the cloning of the insulin and growth hormone genes. He also determined the first sequence responsible for replication of a cancer causing virus.