Joseph Grafton Gall (1928) is an American cell biologist and winner of the 2006 Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award.He was also a co-recipient (with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider) of the 2007 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. In 1983 he was honored with the highest recognition of the American Society for Cell Biology, the E. B. Wilson Medal.
Gall is credited with encouraging women biologists, a group sometimes called "Gall's Gals", in an era when this was relatively uncommon.One of his students who went on to do important work in the science was Susan Gerbi. When asked to explain his encouragement of women in the sciences, he began talking about his mother. Gifted in math and science, she had been the first woman in her family to attend college, graduating in the 1920s. She became a homemaker, not a scientist. But she urged a young Gall to explore the natural world, encouraging him to catch bugs and bring them into the house so together they could identify the creatures using scientific reference books. "It never occurred to me that a woman's aptitude was different than a man's," Gall said. "My father a lawyer was afraid of animals and insects. So, if anything, maybe I thought it went the other way."
Gall invented the technique known as in situ hybridization.In 2005, Gall was featured in a series of interviews with well-known television personality, Bill Nye, for the Science Channel's 100 Greatest Discoveries series.Gall currently heads the Gall Lab, a component of the Department of Embryology in the Carnegie Institution for Science, in Maryland.
