Rate My Professor Ananda Chakrabarty

Ananda Chakrabarty served as Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago. He earned his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Calcutta in 1965, following an MSc from the same university and undergraduate studies in chemistry at St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied hydrocarbon degradation pathways in Pseudomonas bacteria under Irwin Gunsalus, Chakrabarty joined General Electric’s Research & Development Center in Schenectady, New York. There, he engineered a recombinant Pseudomonas putida bacterium capable of degrading crude oil by incorporating multiple plasmids encoding enzymes for hydrocarbon breakdown. This work resulted in a 1972 patent application that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980), affirming the patentability of genetically modified living organisms and launching modern biotechnology patent law.

At UIC, Chakrabarty investigated Pseudomonas aeruginosa mechanisms in chronic infections, such as those in cystic fibrosis patients, including virulence factors, biofilms, and quorum sensing. His later research centered on bacterial cupredoxins like azurin and cytochromes, which exhibit selective antineoplastic activity by entering cancer cells, disrupting cell cycle progression, and inducing apoptosis. Key publications include “A transmissible plasmid controlling camphor oxidation in Pseudomonas putida” (1973, PNAS), “Transformation of Pseudomonas putida and Escherichia coli with plasmid-linked drug-resistance factor DNA” (1975, PNAS), “Nucleoside diphosphate kinase: role in bacterial growth, virulence, and quorum sensing” (1998), and contributions to cancer therapy such as “The anticancer potential of the bacterial protein azurin and its derived peptide p28” (2019). He co-edited Emerging Cancer Therapy: Microbial Approaches and Biotechnological Tools (2010). Chakrabarty was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2007 for genetic engineering advancements, named UIC Inventor of the Year by the Office of Technology Management, received a 1991 faculty award from the College of Medicine, and served on the ICGEB Council of Scientific Advisers. Ananda Chakrabarty passed away on July 10, 2020.