杰弗里·戈登1947—

学术贡献

他和他的团队发现，肠道细菌培养物超重者与正常重量相比的差异，无论是在人类和小鼠中都如此。超重的微生物培养能更好地从食物中产生能量。此外，肥胖老鼠的细菌培养物能吸收更多的脂肪。

奖项和荣誉

2004年戈登入选美国国家科学院，2013年获罗伯·柯霍奖。

Jeffrey I. Gordon is the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor and Director of The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine. He is considered to be the "father" of human microbiome research. His studies of healthy and undernourished children living in low- and middle-income countries have yielded insights about how the gut microbiome develops in the first several years after birth, and evidence that disrupted gut microbiome development is a contributing cause of childhood undernutrition.

Gordon and his group's work has advanced scientific understanding of the human gut microbiome as a microbial "organ" that affects human health and disease beyond gastrointestinal health. Their work has entailed developing experimental and computational approaches for dissecting the vast complexity and dynamism of the gut microbiome to identify microbial effectors of postnatal growth, discovering food formulations and their bioactive molecules that repair undernourished children’s gut microbiomes, and characterizing how microbiome repair in these children has effects that extend beyond the walls of the gut to influence regulators of muscle, bone, and brain development plus immune and metabolic functions. Overall, this work illustrates the importance of understanding that human health reflects an integration of activities of our human and microbial cells and genes.

Much of Gordon's work has focused on addressing the global health challenge of childhood undernutrition. Central questions that Gordon and his lab are pursuing include how our gut microbial communities influence human health, what interventions will repair microbial communities for an individual or a population to optimize healthy development, and how to create local infrastructures to deliver treatment in affordable, culturally acceptable, appetizing foods. He and his team identified underdeveloped gut microbiota as a contributing cause of childhood malnutrition and found that therapeutic food aimed at repairing the gut microbiome is more effective than a widely used standard therapeutic food to treat childhood malnutrition. Unlike standard therapeutic foods, these microbiome-directed foods improve long-term effects of malnutrition, including problems with metabolism, bone growth, immune function and brain development.

Education and career

Gordon was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up in Connecticut. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College (1969) and his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Chicago (1973). After receiving his MD, Gordon completed his clinical training in internal medicine and gastroenterology at Washington University School of Medicine and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Early scientific research

Gordon's early work focused on how the gastrointestinal epithelium is continuously renewed throughout life, and how its component cell types express different functions as they differentiate depending upon where they are located along the length of the gut. This early work employed transgenic mice to study regulation of developmental-stage specific, cell type-specific and spatial patterns of gene expression using members of the fatty acid binding protein gene family as models.

Current research

Gordon and his team are characterizing the role of the gut microbiome in childhood undernutrition (wasting, stunting or a combination of the two), testing the hypothesis that healthy growth of infants and children depends in part on coordinated co-development of the gut microbiome and host organ systems. Gordon's work indicates that the healthy development of microbial communities in the gut during infancy is correlated with a child's healthy growth and development overall.

Honors

Gordon is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society. He is the recipient of a number of awards including:

• 2013 Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology, National Academy of Sciences
• 2013 Robert Koch Award, Koch Foundation
• 2014 Passano Award, Passano Foundation
• 2014 Dickson Prize in Medicine, University of Pittsburgh
• 2015 King Faisal International Prize in Medicine, King Faisal Foundation