My interest in Biology began when I was a high school student and spent a summer at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. There I first experienced research biology and saw research biologists at work; this experience led me to become a biology major in college.

I went on to Swarthmore College where I began as a major in biology but switched to chemistry later so that I could carry out a research thesis. Between my last two years at Swarthmore I spent a summer at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories working with Dr. George Streisinger, and the experience of working with and watching that great teacher led me to molecular biology.

I started graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in biophysics, but when I decided to work on animal viruses I left M.I.T. to study for a summer with Dr. Philip Marcus at the Albert Einstein Medical College and to take the animal virus course at Cold Spring Harbor, then taught by Dr. Richard Franklin and Dr. Edward Simon. I joined Dr. Franklin at the Rockefeller Institute to do my thesis work and then continued in animal virology as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. James Darnell. I had already found that much could be learned by studying virus-specific enzymes, so I studied for a while with Dr. Jerard Hurwitz at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to learn from someone who knew enzymology as a professional.

My first independent position was at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California where I had the rare opportunity to work in association with Dr. Renato Dulbecco. After 2 1/2 years away from a university setting, I returned to M.I.T. in 1968 and have remained there. In 1974, I joined the staff of the M.I.T. Center for Cancer Research under the directorship of Dr. Salvador Luria because I had found that my research interests, that previously had involved mainly the non-oncogenic RNA viruses, were more and more focused on the problems of cancer.

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:

March 7, 1938 in New York, New York

EDUCATION:

1956-1960 Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania B.A. with high honors in Chemistry,

1960 1960-1961 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts, graduate courses toward Ph.D.

1961-1964 Rockefeller University, New York, New York. Ph.D. received in 1964