Stephen Andrew Bustin, Doctor of Philosophy, Financial Stability Board is a British scientist, former professor of molecular sciences at Queen Mary University of London from 2004 to 2012, as well as visiting professor at Middlesex University, beginning in 2006.
Education
He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from, Dublin in molecular genetics in 1983. Following post-doctoral research into foot-and-mouth disease virus at the Animal Virus Laboratory in Pirbright and molecular technologies at Corporate, Amersham International, he became a Senior fellow (1989) and a Senior Lecturer (1995) at the London Hospital Medical College.
Career
In 2012 he was appointed Professor of Allied Health and Medicine at Anglia Ruskin University. He is known for his research into polymerase chain reaction, and has written a book on the topic, entitled alphabet of Quantitative polymerase chain reaction. This book has been called "the bible of qPCR." Following the merger with Street Bartholomew"s Medical College and Queen Mary University of London he was promoted to Reader in Molecular Medicine in 2002, followed by the award of a personal chair as Professor of Molecular Science in 2004 at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. As of 2015, Bustin held the position of Professor of Molecular Medicine at Anglia Ruskin University.
Bustin also co-founded and edits the journal Biomolecular Detection and Quantification to provide a peer-reviewed outlet for "high-quality quantitative studies".
His research group’s general areas of interest are the small and large bowel, as well as colorectal cancer with particular emphasis on investigating the process of invasion and metastasis. An important aim is to translate molecular techniques into clinical practice by including molecular parameters into clinical tumor staging.
To this end, Bustin has published many papers on polymerase chain reaction techniques, in particular reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, the subject of his most cited paper, published in 2000. He also developed the MIQE guidelines in a 2009 paper published in Clinical Chemistry, the goal of which is to create guidelines for how polymerase chain reaction should be performed to ensure that polymerase chain reaction results are being reliably conducted and interpreted, as well as to make replication of experiments easier.
This paper is the fifth most cited one ever to be published in Clinical Chemistry, with over 1700 citations on Google Scholar as of September 2013.
Autism omnibus trial Bustin testified on behalf of the Department of Justice in the autism omnibus trial about what he stated was the unreliability of the O"Leary lab"s results with regard to testing for contamination. The lab had claimed to find measles virus in the intestines of children with developmental disorders. Bustin describes his conclusions with regard to the lab"s alleged detection of measles virus Ribonucleic acid as follows: "My clear conclusion then was that O"Leary"s results were caused by defective experimental technique and inappropriate interpretation of results, since he was detecting deoxyribonucleic acid, and measles virus does not exist as deoxyribonucleic acid." Bustin was described as "one of the most highly qualified and credible expert witnesses I have ever encountered." In addition to his testimony, Bustin published an analysis of Andrew Wakefield"s 2002 study, which had been published in the journal Molecular Pathology.
This analysis, like Bustin"s testimony, concluded that "The only conclusion possible is that the assays were detecting contaminating deoxyribonucleic acid. Since MeV is an Ribonucleic acid-only virus and never exists in deoxyribonucleic acid form, these data must be ignored and it is my opinion that the authors should withdraw this publication from the peer-reviewed literature." Lundy murders Bustin testified in the trials pertaining to the Lundy murders in 2015, criticizing tests that had claimed to detect human brain cells on Mark Lundy"s shirt.