Austin   Newton   spent   his   entire   academic   career   at Princeton as a teacher and scholar, first in the biology department and biochemical sciences program, then as a founding member of the Department of Molecular Biology. During this time, he established a new experimental system and mentored many generations of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows.

Austin was born in Texas, graduating from the University of Texas–Austin in 1959 with a degree in chemistry, and then mi- grating to the University of California–Berkeley for his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1964. Supported by a National Science Foundation fellowship, he then joined the Pasteur group in Paris headed by the Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod. This was during the Golden Age of molecular biology, when much could be imagined, and clear thinking and experimental elegance highly prized. In this environment, Austin showed how an outstanding puzzle in gene regulation could be solved by the clever utilization of simple genetic tools. During this time, he also developed an abiding passion for African sculpture and textiles, the Lewis Thomas Laboratory being but one of the lucky beneficiaries of his expertise and practiced eye.

At Princeton, where he was appointed an assistant professor in 1966, he continued work begun in Paris, publishing several classic papers of fundamental importance to our understanding of coordinated gene translation. He soon realized, however, that molecular biology was moving on, and that the genetic approaches with which he was familiar could be used to launch an attack on fundamental problems in developmental biology. This became the major focus of his research at Princeton.