Edward Berger, professor emeritus of biological sciences, died on Sept. 4 at 82. A prolific geneticist, Berger spent nearly four decades at Dartmouth working out how hormones switch genes on and off in the developing fruit fly. He also spoke widely on the ethics of genetic engineering.
“Few scientists in this faculty’s history have matched Edward Berger’s productivity, and fewer still gave as much of themselves to the people around them,” said John Carey, interim dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “He cared deeply about the students in his classroom, the researchers in his lab, and colleagues across our administration, and he insisted that we take the ethics of genetics as seriously as the research itself.”
Berger was born in New York City on May 2, 1944, and grew up in the Bronx. He was the first in his family to finish college. He earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Hunter College in 1965, then a master’s and a doctorate in zoology from Syracuse University, where he completed his PhD in 1969. Two postdoctoral fellowships followed—first at Harvard with Fotis Kafatos, where he studied cocoonase, the enzyme a moth uses to break out of its cocoon, and then at the University of Chicago with Richard Lewontin, where he took up the measurement of genetic variation in wild populations. For the rest of his career, Berger worked between those two worlds, the molecular and the evolutionary.
He came to Dartmouth in 1975 as an assistant professor, after four years at the State University of New York at Albany. He was promoted to associate professor in 1977 and to full professor in 1984, and from 1990 to 1995 he held the Albert Bradley Third Century Professorship of Science.
Berger’s early research asked how much genetic diversity hides inside a wild population. He measured enzyme variation in fruit flies, periwinkle snails, and water fleas. His lab later focused on how a developing insect knows to switch specific genes on and off at the right time. Much of that work centered on heat shock proteins and ecdysone, the steroid hormone that drives metamorphosis.
Berger published more than 100 papers over the course of his career, with many in the top journals in his field. “His record was off scale relative to any other member of our department in terms of publication productivity, and he worked in a discipline of biology where papers are much harder to come by,” said Mark McPeek, the David T. McLaughlin Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences, whom Berger hired. Years later, McPeek said, Berger’s numbers still stand above anyone who has come through the department since. Berger was also very successful in supporting his research with continuous grant support from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
In his last years of research, Berger worked on microRNAs, the small molecules that help time development. With Victor Ambros, then a Dartmouth colleague, and members of his own lab, he showed that ecdysone controls the let-7 microRNA during metamorphosis. (Ambros shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNA.)
Berger taught genetics for most of his career at Dartmouth, and his classes were large. His main genetics course grew to more than 200 students, and a non-majors course on genetics and society drew nearly 300. He also taught a seminar on the ethics of scientific research.
An elected member of the Human Genome Organisation, Berger lectured widely on the promise and the risks of mapping the human genome. He worked with the Dartmouth moral philosopher Bernard Gert on the ethics of germ-line gene therapy, and the two wrote together on when altering human genes could be justified.
After scientists announced in 1997 that they had cloned a sheep named Dolly, Berger pressed his own profession to lead the public debate. In a 1998 essay for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine titled “Will There Ever Be Another You?”, he argued that President Clinton’s ban on human cloning treated the question as settled before scientists and the public had reasoned it through. He wanted experts to convene, the way they had at the 1975 meeting that set the first federal rules for gene-splicing research. He had made the same case the year before in Newsday and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Berger was also a dedicated administrator. He chaired the Department of Biological Sciences three times between 1988 and 2006; served as dean of graduate studies and associate dean of the faculty for interdisciplinary programs from 1994 to 1997; and was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1997 to 2001, where he recruited faculty and helped bring in new funding.
Colleagues remember the care he gave the people closest to his work. For about a decade his lab in Gilman was just three people: Berger and a married couple, Edward Dubrovsky and Veronica Dubrovskaya, who had left Russia for France in 1991 and then come to Dartmouth. Berger was devoted to them and their success. Dubrovsky went on to a faculty position at Fordham University, where he still teaches.
Berger also went out of his way to support younger faculty. “Ed was always helpful, honest, and cheerful to me and his other junior colleagues,” McPeek recalled.
Roger Sloboda, the Ira Allen Eastman Professor of Biological Sciences, Emeritus, remembers how Berger often stopped by his office to chat. “It wasn’t till later that I realized those chats were him mentoring me, before the word mentor was used very often, if at all,” he said. “He taught me how to be a better manager of my own lab and students, and navigate the egos in the department. I owe what I think of my successful career at Dartmouth to the foundation Ed laid for me.”
Berger was also instrumental in helping to bring William Wickner from UCLA to Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. “This appointment greatly enhanced the national stature of the med school,” Sloboda said. “The annual Dartmouth Symposium for the Life Sciences, which advertises Dartmouth science activity regionally, came directly from that appointment.”
Berger’s four children grew up helping him catch fruit flies, the workhorse of his research. He retired in 2014, and he and his wife, Barbara, moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia.
Berger is survived by his wife, Barbara Fritsche Berger; his children, Alex, Nick, Tanya, and Matt; and five grandchildren.
The Dartmouth flag will be lowered in Berger’s honor on Thursday, Sept. 24, and Friday, Sept. 25.