David C. Page (born 1956) is an American biologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the director of the Whitehead Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. He is best known for his work on mapping the Y-chromosome and on its evolution in mammals and expression during development. He was cited by Bryan Sykes in Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men. Education and early life Page was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1956 and grew up in the rural outskirts of Pennsylvania Dutch country. The first of his family to go to college, Page attended Swarthmore College, where he graduated with a BA with highest honors in chemistry in 1978. During his final year at Swarthmore, Page attended class just one day a week and spent the rest of his time researching chromatin structure in the laboratory of molecular biologist Robert Simpson at the National Institutes of Health. In 1978, Page enrolled at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences Program, where he worked in the laboratories of David Botstein at MIT and Raymond White at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In White's lab, Page worked on a project to develop a genetic linkage map of the human genome that would become a precursor to the Human Genome Project. The work relied on locating restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLP). The first RFLP that Page found was from a site of homology between the X chromosome and Y chromosome, a coincidence that would set the direction of his subsequent career. Page finished his MD degree in the spring of 1984 and started his own lab as the first Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research researching the genetics of XX male syndrome, or de la Chapelle Syndrome. After Page won the MacArthur "Genius Grant" in 1986, Page was promoted to the faculty of the Whitehead Institute and the MIT Department of Biology in 1988. In 1990, Page was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and in 2005 he was named as director of the Whitehead Institute. Research and career Page has worked in several areas of genetics. Mapping the Y chromosome In his work on de la Chapelle Syndrome in 1986, Page collaborated with the geneticist who originally identified the first XX male, Albert de la Chapelle, and geneticist Jean Weissenbach to show that XX males carry a small piece of