Avram Hershko

Origins and early life

Avram Hershko was born Herskó Ferenc in Karcag, Hungary, on 31 December 1937, to a Jewish family in which both parents were teachers.

Work and career

During the war his father was taken into forced labour with the Hungarian army and then held prisoner by the Soviets, and for years the family had no word of him. Avram, his mother and his elder brother were put into the ghetto at Szolnok; in its final days most of the Jews there were sent to be murdered at Auschwitz, but the three of them boarded trains that took them instead to a camp in Austria, where they were used as forced labour until the war ended.

All of them survived, and his father came back four years after they had last seen him. The family emigrated to Israel in 1950. Working at the Technion in Haifa with his student Aaron Ciechanover and with Irwin Rose, Hershko answered a question biology had largely ignored: not how a cell builds a protein, but how it destroys one. They found that the cell tags a protein for demolition with a small marker called ubiquitin, and that this controlled destruction is itself a form of regulation — the mechanism that governs the cell cycle, DNA repair and much else, and whose failure is implicated in cancer.

Recognition

The prizes followed: the Israel Prize in 1994, the Gairdner in 1999, the Lasker in 2000, the Horwitz Prize and the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2001, and in 2004 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Ciechanover and Rose.