Seymour Jonathan Singer

Who is Seymour Jonathan Singer?

Seymour Jonathan Singer is a cell biologist and professor at the University of California, San Diego. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Linus Pauling at Caltech, where he co-discovered the basis of abnormal hemoglobin in sickle-cell anemia, reported in the famous paper "Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease". In 1951, he became an assistant professor at Yale, where he developed the ferritin-antibody, which was the first electron-dense reagent used for cell staining in electron microscopy imaging. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Molecular & Cellular Biology in 1959.

In 1961 he joined the faculty at UCSD. He then began to work on membrane proteins and aided in the development of the "Fluid Mosaic Model" of the cell membrane, going on to publish a paper on the subject, "The Fluid Mosaic Model of the Structure of Cell Membranes", co-written with Garth L. Nicolson, in Science in 1972. He later studied the cytoskeleton. In 2001, he published a book, The Splendid Feast of Reason, regarding rationalism and the philosophy of science.