Piet Borst

Piet Borst (1934) received his MD, PhD for biochemical studies on mitochondria (supervisor: E.C. Slater). After working on RNA bacteriophages as a postdoc  with Weissmann and Ochoa in New York, he returned in 1964 to Amsterdam University, where he studied biogenesis of cell organelles (mitochondria, peroxisomes) and antigenic variation in African trypanosomes. In 1983 he became director of the Netherlands Cancer Institute. After stepping down in 1999,  Borst continued studying: The biosynthesis and function of DNA base J, discovered by his group in trypanosomatids in 1993; mechanisms of drug resistance in cancer cells; and endogenous substrates of the ABCC (MRP) class of drug transporters. Most recently his lab solved the biochemical basis of one of the last inborn errors of metabolism, Pseudoxanthoma elasticum. In 2015 Borst closed his lab, but he remains an active staff member of the Cancer Institute. Awards: a.o. the Paul Ehrlich-Ludwig Darmstaedter Preis, the Robert Koch gold medal; the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Borst was for 7 years the president of the Louis Jeantet Prize jury, and he chaired a.o. the SACs of the EMBL and the Institut Pasteur. Borst is a (foreign) member of the Academia Europeae, the British Royal Society and the NAS, and a foreign honorary Commander of the British Empire (CBE).