H. Robert Horvitz

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Howard Robert Horvitz ForMemRS NAS AAA&S APS NAM (born May 8, 1947) is an American biologist whose research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Nobelprize"/> was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".<ref>Press Release, nobelprize.org. Accessed February 28, 2024.</ref>

Early life and education

Horvitz was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Jewish parents,<ref name="Haaretz-article"/> the son of Mary R. (Savit), a school teacher, and Oscar Freedom Horvitz, a GAO accountant. He majored in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined Alpha Epsilon Pi and spent his summers working for IBM, at first wiring panels for accounting machines and then in his final summer helping to develop IBM's Conversational Programming System.<ref name="Nobelprize"/>

During his senior year, Horvitz took his first courses in biology and was encouraged by his professors to continue to study biology in graduate school, despite his limited coursework in the field. After he completed his undergraduate studies in 1968, he enrolled in graduate studies in biology at Harvard University, where he studied T4-induced modifications of E. coli RNA polymerase under the direction of Walter Gilbert and James Watson. He completed his PhD in 1974.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref>

Career

In 1974, Horvitz took a postdoctoral position at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England, where he worked with his future Nobel prize co-winners Sydney Brenner and John Sulston on the genetics and cell lineage of C. elegans. In 1978, Horvitz was offered a faculty position at MIT, where he is currently Professor of Biology and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Horvitz serves as the chair of the board of trustees for Society for Science & the Public and is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Research

At LMB, Horvitz worked with Sulston to track every non-gonadal cell division that occurred during larval development, and published a complete description of these lineages in 1977.<ref name="Nobelprize"/><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Later, in cooperation with Sulston and Martin Chalfie, Horvitz began investigations first characterizing several cell lineage mutants<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and then seeking genes that controlled cell lineage or that controlled specific lineages. In 1981, they identified and characterized the gene lin-4, a "heterochronic" mutant that changes the timeline of cell fates.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

In his early work at MIT, Horvitz continued his work on cell lineage and cell fate, using C. elegans to investigate whether there was a genetic program controlling cell death, or apoptosis. In 1986, he identified the first "death genes", ced-3 and ced-4. He showed that functional ced-3 and ced-4 genes were a prerequisite for cell death to be executed.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> He went on to show that another gene, ced-9, protects against cell death by interacting with ced-4 and ced-3, as well as identifying a number of genes that direct how a dead cell is eliminated. Horvitz showed that the human genome contains a ced-3-like gene.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Horvitz's later research continued to use C. elegans to analyze the genetic control of animal development and behavior, as well as to link discoveries in the nematode to human diseases, particularly cancer and neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He made further advancements in defining the molecular pathway of programmed cell death, and has identified several key components, including: EGL-1, a protein which activates apoptosis by inhibiting CED-9;<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> transcription factors ces-1 and ces-2,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and ced-8, which controls the timing of cell death.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> He continued working on heterochronic mutants and other aspects of cell lineage, and established lines of research in signal transduction, morphogenesis, and neural development. Horvitz has collaborated with Victor Ambros and David Bartel on a project to characterize the complete set of the more than 100 microRNAs in the C. elegans genome.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Works

Template:Scholia Horvitz has over 255 publications, has been cited over 49,000 times and has an h-index of 108.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Awards and honors

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See also

References

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Further reading

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