Stanley Cohen
Stanley Cohen · Science & Medicine
Growth Factors
1922, Brooklyn, New York, United States — 2020, Nashville, Tennessee, United States
United States (Vanderbilt University, Nashville)
Stanley Cohen was an American-Jewish biochemist who co-developed recombinant DNA technology.
Origins and early life
Stanley Cohen was born in Brooklyn on 17 November 1922, the son of Fannie and Louis Cohen, a tailor; his parents were Jewish immigrants. He took a bachelor's degree at Brooklyn College in 1943 with a double major in chemistry and biology, worked as a bacteriologist in a milk plant to pay his way, took a master's in zoology at Oberlin in 1945 and a doctorate at Michigan in 1948 on the metabolism of earthworms.
Work and career
At Washington University in St Louis he joined Rita Levi-Montalcini and together they isolated nerve growth factor, the first of the substances that tell a cell to grow. He then found a protein that made newborn mice open their eyes and cut their teeth early, and named it epidermal growth factor. From 1959 he continued at Vanderbilt. That work is the foundation of how growth signals are now understood in cancer, and of the drugs designed to block them.
He shared the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize with Levi-Montalcini in 1983, and in 1986 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the National Medal of Science. He died on 5 February 2020.
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Source: Nobel Prize Medicine 1986
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Growth Factors
Source: Nobel Prize Medicine 1986
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