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Anthony P. Bretscher

British biologist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 19, 2025
Entity authorityQ4773232
Source-derived summary

Anthony P. Bretscher (born September 8, 1950 in Harwell, Berkshire, England) is a professor of cell biology at Cornell University in the Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

After training as a physicist at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Bretscher earned his Ph.D. in genetics with Simon Baumberg at the University of Leeds. From there, he was a European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University with Dale Kaiser. He then went as a Max Planck Society Fellow to the Department of Biochemistry in the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany to work with Klaus Weber. In 1980, he was appointed to the faculty in the Cell Biology Department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. He relocated to Cornell in 1981.

The Bretscher lab studies how microfilaments contribute to cell organization and cell polarity. The lab also studies how microfilaments contribute to membrane trafficking and cell signaling pathways.

He was elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

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The public source identifies “Anthony P. Bretscher” as british biologist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Anthony, Bretscher and British.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1950, 1980, 1981, 2018—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1950-09-08. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Anthony, Bretscher and British providing the first useful test.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4773232. VIAF identifies the subject as 304476372. The Library of Congress control number is no2013071908. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1980, 1981 and 2018.

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This entry incorporates text from Anthony P. Bretscher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.