The passing of Clyde A. Hutchison, III

The passing of Clyde A. Hutchison, III

Clyde A. Hutchison, III
November 26, 1938 - September 27, 2025

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Clyde A. Hutchison, III, J. Craig Venter Institute distinguished professor Emeritus. He died this past Saturday peacefully at home with his wife Phifer and son Edward in La Jolla, California. He was 86.

Friend and colleague John Glass, JCVI professor and La Jolla campus director, memorialized Clyde's remarkable life and career in the following note to JCVI staff.

Clyde was one of the world's most accomplished biochemists and synthetic biologists. As he did his whole career, Clyde continued working at the lab bench even after he turned 80. He was a remarkably meticulous and thoughtful experimentalist. His lab notebooks are masterclasses in how to be an experimental biologist.

Clyde is notable in that he had two extraordinary careers. First, after earning his doctorate at Cal Tech, he joined the Microbiology and Immunology Department faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chaple Hill (UNC) in 1968. While at UNC, Clyde was responsible for multiple important events in the history of molecular biology.

Clyde made substantial contributions to the discovery of the site-directed mutagenesis technique to introduce designed mutations into the genome of the bacteriophage Phi X 174. This work enabled his studies of that virus and was also a major advance in molecular biology. He also discovered maternal inheritance of mammalian mitochondrial genomes in 1974, work later repeated in human mitochondria by Douglas Wallace at the University of Pennsylvania. While on sabbatical leave, he was on Fred Sanger's team that reported the first use of Sanger DNA sequencing in 1974. For these and other accomplishments, Clyde was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 1995.

During a sabbatical two decades later (1994-95), Clyde spent time at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR, a forerunner to JCVI), setting the stage for his later synthetic biology work. In 2004, Clyde's second career began in earnest when he retired from UNC to join the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (another a forerunner to JCVI) to help answer the question, "What is life?" Our plan was to construct a minimal bacterial cell that we could use as an experimental chassis to delve into the first principles of cell biology.

Clyde, Hamilton Smith, and Craig Venter led JCVI's effort to design and build the world's first bacterium with a synthetic genome, JCVI-syn1.0 in 2010, and the first minimal bacterial cell, JCVI-syn3.0 in 2016 (now used as a model organism in labs worldwide). These landmark achievements in the history of biology have profoundly changed our understanding of living cells. Along the road to constructing and analyzing those synthetic cells, Clyde was critical in the development of foundational techniques in synthetic biology and in the advancement of computational modeling of living cells.

Many of you were not lucky enough to know Clyde in his prime or joined after he retired. It was my great privilege to have known Clyde for over 50 years. My first interaction is when I applied to be an intern in his UNC lab as a freshman in 1974, but he turned me down-it may have had to do with his going on sabbatical-though, I have long since forgiven him.

Four years later, our paths crossed again when I became a lab tech in the Microbiology Department at UNC in 1978. There, I got to know Clyde, and we became friends. Later he was on my graduate school advisory committee. I often went to him for wisdom and inspiration. I came to realize that while Clyde and I occupied the same world, he saw things differently than the rest of us. Perhaps that perspective is what made him the great scientist he was. I know he made me a better scientist. During my two decades at JCVI, Clyde became one of my dearest friends.

Clyde loved irony and was remarkably funny. He and Ham Smith would hold court in their offices at JCVI. They would talk about science and the world. We mere mortals who had the privilege of being in the room would be in awe at the discourse and revel in their wit.

While Clyde's scientific world was precise and rigorous, his other love, jazz, was more free flowing and spontaneous. Clyde played classic jazz piano with joy and verve. During our friendship, I fondly remember being entranced by his renditions of jazz classics at gigs in bars and restaurants in Chapel Hill, Rockville, and La Jolla. That's how I want to remember Clyde: transcendently brilliant and with playful jazz at the edges.

He will be missed.

John