Life, it seems, had prepared him for such disruptions and new starts. In the five years since he arrived at Yale from New York University, he has built new facilities for his own laboratory and brought in 13 new graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. He personally hired many of its junior members-including six new professors-as part of a wholesale effort to revamp one of Yale’s flagship programs.
He faced out toward the department he leads and whose laboratories and offices fill the new building. Behind him the window offered a view of downtown New Haven. A scientist-soldierĪ few months before Schlessinger left for Israel to accept the Dan David prize, he sat in his sunlight-filled corner office in the new extension of the B-wing of Sterling Hall of Medicine. But although he may no longer fear bombs and bullets striking home, the impact of war never goes away. Living at the forefront of the scientific world and financially secure beyond the dreams of most academic scientists, Schlessinger seems far removed from the wars that dogged his life from the very first moment. His discoveries have led to a new field of cancer therapy research that has already produced a new generation of targeted anticancer drugs.Īlong the way, Schlessinger also cofounded two biotechnology companies and serves as an advisor to several others-work that has led to one drug that is extending cancer patients’ lives and other agents that are at the testing stage. He has also shown how aberrant cellular signals can lead to cancer and has suggested ways to block them. His studies have helped to open a new understanding of the ways in which signals from growth factor proteins circulating in the blood reach the interior of cells and stimulate them to divide and grow.
Today Schlessinger, who has published almost 500 papers, is regarded as one of the world’s leading cellular biologists and cancer investigators. Schlessinger epitomizes the scientist that has paved the road from basic research in the laboratory, all the way to the patient.”
#Long war 2 research code
Schlessinger’s citation praised him “for his critical role in deciphering a new code for the flow of information from the cell surface into the cell. The three were among the recipients who shared three $1 million Dan David Prizes, established in 2001 by David, an inventor of photographic technologies, to honor cultural, scientific, social or technological achievements. Schlessinger took the stage in a Tel Aviv University auditorium alongside cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Polish journalist and leader in the fight against Communist repression, Adam Michnik. Prusoff Professor of Pharmacology, and chair of the department, Schlessinger made one of his frequent trips back to Israel last May, where he maintains close scientific ties. Just surviving such inauspicious and violent beginnings would seem an achievement: Yossi Schlessinger, however, would go on to discern some of the most important mechanisms in the life cycle of the cell and make discoveries about the causes of cancer that have led to some of the most effective new treatments for the disease. For their son, a lifetime of war had just begun. But as soon as the Schlessingers disembarked from their ship, they stepped into the war between the new Jewish nation and its Arab neighbors-battles that continue to this day. After Schlessinger’s father was jailed for several months for making a joke at work about Marshal Josip Tito, the Communist leader who had taken control of Yugoslavia, the Schlessingers fled to Israel, where Yossi’s parents had family. The parents of Yossi, as he was called, fought on for two more months until the end of the war in Europe.
With Topusko about to fall to German forces, the family boarded a cart and retreated into the mountains. His parents, Jewish partisans fighting the invaders and local fascists, swaddled the newborn in silk cut from a British soldier’s parachute and grabbed their rifles. Gunfire crackled and artillery exploded outside the battered house where she delivered a baby boy who was given the name Joseph.
On March 26, 1945, in the village of Topusko in the mountains near Zagreb in German-occupied Yugoslavia, Rifka Schlessinger went into labor.