Leonard Lerman, PhD, died September 19 at the age of 87 after a long illness. Dr. Lerman, a molecular biologist, was a former senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His pioneering discovery of how DNA may be manipulated provided a critical step for subsequent analysis of DNA, and was fundamental to the triplet code hypothesis for protein synthesis. At age 16, Dr. Lerman won a science radio show contest in Pittsburgh and received a scholarship to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. As such, he entered college prior to graduating from high school; earning a Bachelor of Science degree in just five semesters. He worked in an experimental weapons research lab during World War II, and went on to earn his PhD in chemistry in 1950 at the California Institute of Technology, where he studied under Nobel laureate, Linus Pauling.
While working at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in the late 1950’s, Dr. Lerman began to study how chemical compounds might attach to DNA, altering its structure and potentially resulting in mutations. In 1959, he took a sabbatical year to work with Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. His work contributed to their effort to manipulate DNA by insertion or deletion of nucleotides and their subsequent experiments, which established the triplet code.
Dr. Lerman’s work shaped the methods used to manipulate and study DNA and has provided important diagnostic applications for identifying variants in human genes associated with genetic diseases. Over the course of his career, Dr. Lerman served on the faculties of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, and the State University of New York at Albany. He also worked at the Genetics Institute in Boston and was a senior lecturer at MIT. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Jerome Horwitz
Jerome P. Horwitz, PhD, creator of azidothymidine (AZT), died on September 6 at age 93. Dr. Horwitz developed AZT in 1964 with the goal of curing cancer, but abandoned the drug to explore other ideas when it failed at its intended purpose. In the mid-1980’s, when researchers were working to develop and identify treatments for AIDS, the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome initiated an investigation to determine whether AZT might be effective in treating people with AIDS. Upon determining the efficacy of the treatment, Burroughs Wellcome (later GlaxoSmithKline) obtained a patent for the drug. Dr. Horwitz did not receive financial compensation for developing AZT, which became the first successful drug treatment for individuals with AIDS.
Dr. Horwitz earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Detroit, where he also completed a master’s degree. He earned his PhD in chemistry in 1948 at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the Michigan Cancer Foundation (since renamed as the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute) and the Wayne State Medical School faculty as a cancer researcher in the mid-1950’s, he worked in the field of rocket fuel sciences at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He continued to serve the cancer center and at Wayne State University until retiring in 2005.
Among his last projects was a five-year, $900,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health to develop drugs to treat solid tumors. For this effort, Dr. Horwitz received the first royalty check of his career at age 86. Dr. Horwitz also discovered didanosine and stavudine, which, along with AZT, form the basis for modern antiviral therapy.