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Sir Adrian Peter Bird (born 3 July 1947) is a British geneticist and Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. Bird has spent much of his academic career in Edinburgh, from receiving his PhD in 1970 to working at the MRC Mammalian Genome Unit and later serving as director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology. His research focuses on understanding DNA methylation and , and their role in diseases such as Rett syndrome.
In 1990, Adrian Bird became Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. He helped create the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, also in Edinburgh, and served as its director from 1999 until 2011, when he was succeeded by David Tollervey. From 2000 to 2010, he was also a governor of the Wellcome Trust, serving as deputy chairman during the latter three years.
Bird is a trustee of the charitable organisation Cancer Research UK and of the Rett Syndrome Research Trust. He also serves as a Governance Board Member of the Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre. Governance Board Members of the Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre. Retrieved 7 January 2014.
Bird's research has focused on and their associated binding-factor MeCP2. He led the team which first identified CpG islands—originally named "HpaII tiny fragments"—in vertebrate genomes. These are short genomic regions with a high density of CpG site, and are commonly found in an DNA methylation within or nearby to an active gene's promoter.
Bird's group discovered that the MeCP2 protein binds specifically to methylated CpG sites, and further that disruption of this interaction causes the autism spectrum disorder Rett syndrome. The Bird lab also implicated nuclear receptor co-repressor 1 as an important binding partner in the MeCP2/methyl-CpG interaction.
In 2007, the Bird laboratory published a paper in the journal Science describing a proof-of-principle that the murine equivalent of Rett syndrome could be successfully reversed in laboratory mouse. This was accomplished by reintroducing a functional MeCP2 gene and proved successful even when the condition was at an advanced stage, hinting at the possibility of a gene therapy approach to curing the human disease in the future.
Bird was awarded the Gabor Medal in 1999 "in recognition of his pioneering work in the study of global mechanisms by which transcription of the mammalian genome is regulated and for his exploration into the molecular basis of fundamental biological mechanisms, particularly his development of ways of analysing methylation patterns of eukaryotic DNA using endonucleases and the discovery of and continued research into a new class of DNA sequences found in all vertebrates". He received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in the same year, and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2005.
In 2011, he was a recipient of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, "for his pioneering discoveries on DNA methylation and its role in gene expression." The following year Bird won the 2012 GlaxoSmithKline Prize. In 2013, he was named a Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate and received the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine "for his discoveries in the field of epigenetics".
In 2013, Bird was tipped as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "fundamental discoveries concerning DNA methylation and gene expression" though the prize later went to James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof.
He was Knight Bachelor in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to science.
In 2016, he was elected as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. and received the Shaw Prize together with Huda Y. Zoghbi. In 2017 he received the Charles Rudolphe Brupbacher Prize.
He was awarded the Buchanan Medal of the Royal Society in 2018 for his medical discoveries, and elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2001. In 2020 he was awarded the Brain Prize.
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