John Roth (geneticist)

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John Roger Roth (born March 14, 1939, in Winona, Minnesota) is an American geneticist and evolutionist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He earned a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and he also received an honorary PhD from Umeå University. His early work studied the structure and regulation of the operon in Salmonella, and he later explored regulation in other systems such as tRNA suppression, NAD biosynthesis, and B12-dependent metabolism of small molecules like ethanolamine and propanediol. With David Botstein and Nancy Kleckner, he helped develop the use of transposons as genetic tools. He also studied chromosomal duplications in bacteria and the role of small-effect mutations in evolution under selection. He taught the Advanced Bacterial Genetics course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with Botstein and Ron Davis, helping many scientists learn these techniques. Roth has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1988. He received the Genetics Society of America’s Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal (2009) and the American Society for Microbiology Lifetime Achievement Award (2015). In 2011, ASM Press published a festschrift in his honor, The Lure of Bacterial Genetics: A Tribute to John Roth. He has worked at UC Berkeley, the University of Utah, and UC Davis, and is married to Shery G. Roth.