H. Robert Horvitz

Origins and early life

Howard Robert Horvitz was born in Chicago on 8 May 1947 to Jewish parents, Mary Savit, a schoolteacher, and Oscar Horvitz, an accountant.

Work and career

He read mathematics at MIT, spending his summers at IBM wiring panels for accounting machines and, in his last summer, helping build a conversational programming system; he took his first biology courses only in his final year, and his teachers pushed him towards biology for graduate school anyway. In 1974 he went to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, to work with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston on a millimetre-long nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans.

With Sulston he tracked every cell division of the animal's larval development and published the complete lineage in 1977. What that made visible was that certain cells are supposed to die: the worm builds itself partly by killing off cells on schedule, and genes govern the killing. Programmed cell death turned out to run through cancer, neurodegeneration and immunity. He joined MIT in 1978 and is a professor of biology there. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002 with Brenner and Sulston.