Peter Anthony Noble Non-Member New

Retired Professor

Peter A. Noble is a retired professor whose research on DNA microarrays, postmortem transcript abundance, and the death microbiome has been published in peer-reviewed journals and covered by outlets including Science, Discover, Forbes, The Scientist, Smithsonian, Popular Science, and New Scientist. For thirteen years he and his colleague Alex Pozhitkov worked on the molecular biology of the hours after death, without funding. The research was done in the margins of jobs that were nominally about other things.
That body of work includes the first calibrated time-course of postmortem transcript abundance; the demonstration that postmortem interval can be predicted from that data by linear regression, accurately enough to function as a molecular clock; the RNA-sponge analysis explaining part of the mechanism; the thanatomicrobiome, the microbial succession that colonizes a body once its defenses stop; and two conceptual papers in BioEssays.