Harvey Lodish

founding member, Whitehead Institute

Harvey was born in Cleveland, Ohio on November 16, 1941. Harvey's first publication was in 1946, a letter published in a children's column in the Cleveland Press. At Taylor Elementary School in Cleveland Heights, Harvey was appointed head of the school crossing guards, giving him authority over about 20 5th and 6th grade students. After three years at Roosevelt Junior High, Harvey entered Cleveland Heights High School, where he participated in a small research project measuring the levels of various nitrogenous compounds in the blood directed by Dr. Ethel Laughlin, a chemistry teacher. During the summers of 1958, '59, and '60 Harvey worked at Western Reserve (now Case Western Reserve) Medical School with Dr. Robert Eckel studying potassium transport in red blood cells. This led to his first scientific publication in 1960, and he has been studying red blood cells ever since. (And in 1982 he was elected to the Cleveland Heights High School Alumni Hall of Fame, an honor he shares with his two younger brothers Leonard and Richard). Harvey entered Kenyon College in 1959 and graduated three years later, summa cum laude and with Highest Honors in chemistry and mathematics. During the summer of 1960 he worked at Stanford in the chemistry laboratory of Dr. Carl Djerassi, a Kenyon alumnus and "discoverer of the birth control pill." Harvey was awarded an honorary D. Sc. degree from Kenyon in 1982 and since 1989 has served as a member of the Kenyon College Board of Trustees. Harvey received his PhD degree in genetics with Dr. Norton Zinder from the Rockefeller University in 1966; his thesis focused on a genetic and biochemical analysis of the three genes in the RNA bacteriophage f2. Then followed two years of postdoctoral research at the M.R.C. Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Dr. Sydney Brenner and Dr. Francis Crick. He joined the faculty of the MIT Department of Biology in 1968. Harvey was promoted to professor in 1976, and in 1983 was appointed member of the new Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. His one "real" sabbatical was in 1977- 78 as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London with Dr. Robin Weiss. Harvey was on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He was on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science and was Editor of Molecular and Cellular Biology from 1981 to 1987 Harvey has been on the editorial boards of a number of other journals, including the Journal of Cell Biology, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and Nucleic Acids Research. He has served on advisory panels for the NIH, NSF, and American Cancer Society, and on the advisory boards of several institutions, including the Biozentrum of the University of Basle, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, the Center for Molecular Biology Heidelberg (ZMBH), the Life Sciences Institute of the University of Michigan, and the PEW Scholars Program in Biomedical Sciences; he chaired the advisory boards of the Division of Basic Sciences of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute. Currently he is a member of the advisory board of the California Institute of Technology Division of Biology.