Hans Ris (June 15, 1914 - November 19, 2004) was an American cytologist and pioneer electron microscopist. His studies of chromosome structure revealed the importance of non-histone proteins. He was one of the first to recognize that blue-green algae were a special type of bacteria. He coined the term genophore for prokaryote DNA to highlight its differences from the eukaryal chromosome. Ris was a founding member of the ASCB and received the Distinguished Scientist Award by the Microscopy Society of America in 1983.

Biography

Hans Ris was born in Bern, Switzerland on 15 June 1914, where he also grew up. Inspired by the works of the French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, he observed the habits of ants, wasps and bees. He came to America in 1938 to work with B.H. Willier at Rochester, New York. After receiving his PhD at Columbia University he moved to Johns Hopkins and later to the laboratory of Alfred Mirsky at Rockefeller University, where he studied the structure of chromosomes. He then went to the zoology department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1949, where he started to work with electron microscopes. In 1972 he established the HVEM laboratory at Madison. He retired at age 75 but remained Emeritus Investigator of the University of Wisconsin’s Integrated Microscopy Resource Center (IMRC) and continued to work on high-resolution images of the nuclear pore complex which he used to nickname "fish trap".

Hans Ris Symposium

The Integrated Microscopy Resource Center of the University of Wisconsin organizes a symposium in his honour starting in 2012. As of September 2014, preparations were underway to hold it again in October 2014.

Selected works

• Mirsky, A. E., and Hans Ris. "Variable and constant components of chromosomes." Nature 163.4148 (1949): 666-666.
• Mirsky, A. E., and Hans Ris. "The desoxyribonucleic acid content of animal cells and its evolutionary significance." The Journal of general physiology 34.4 (1951): 451.
• Peterson, JOAN B., and Hans Ris. "Electron-microscopic study of the spindle and chromosome movement in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae." Journal of cell science 22.2 (1976): 219-242.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]