Profile of Nahum Sonenberg

Abstract

Five years after the final shots of World War II rang out, a child and his father stood on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. From their vantage point in a cemetery in the town of Jaffa, Israel, the boy gazed across the sea and envisioned stepping onto the sands of a distant shore. He pointed to the horizon and asked his father what lay beyond. Nahum Sonenberg. Image courtesy of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “I remember my father said, ‘There is America, the country where everything is possible,’” says Nahum Sonenberg, the Gilman Cheney Professor of Biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal. Sonenberg, elected as a foreign associate to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, has spent nearly five decades looking beyond the horizon to map unexplored territory in molecular biology. His research has uncovered the cellular control knobs of protein synthesis and revealed how this process drifts off-course in cancer, obesity, diabetes, and neurological diseases. His achievements have garnered numerous honors. Sonenberg is a fellow of the Royal Society of London and Canada, Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Associate Member of European Molecular Biology Organization, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has received numerous prizes in the biological sciences, including the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Science, the Wolf Prize, and the Gairdner Foundation International Award. Sonenberg’s childhood unfolded in the aftermath of World War II. His parents were Jewish textile workers who had fled from Poland to Russia in 1939 to escape the Nazis. Soon after their arrival, Sonenberg’s father was arrested by the Russians and accused of spying for the Germans. He was sent to a forced-labor camp; meanwhile, his mother was assigned …