Nobel Prize Winners for Medicine and Physics

(JTA) — Brandeis Neuroscientist, the Son of a Cantor, Wins Nobel Prize for Medicine

Michael Rosbash of Brandeis University, whose parents fled Nazi Germany and who is the son of a cantor, was one of three American scientists to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The prize awarded to Rosbash, 74, and the others announced Monday was for their discoveries about molecular mechanisms controlling the body’s daily rhythm. Jeffrey Hall of the University of Maine and Michael Young of Rockefeller University in New York joined Rosbash in receiving the prize.

They used fruit flies to isolate a gene that controls the rhythm of a living organism’s daily life. The biological inner clocks regulate functions such as sleep, behavior, hormone levels and body temperature.

Rosbash came to Brandeis in 1974 and is the Peter Gruber Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and professor of biology at the Jewish-founded nonsectarian school.

“This morning’s unexpected announcement certainly affected my circadian rhythms,” Rosbach said in a statement from Brandeis. “I am thrilled to join Jeffrey and Michael in this recognition. I am grateful to my colleagues at Brandeis and to the unusual environment here that allows researchers to explore without boundaries while also engaging students in the process of discovery. This is a very special — perhaps unique — university,”

His parents were immigrants who fled Germany in 1938. His father was a cantor at Temple Ohabei Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Brookline, Massachusetts, not far from the Brandeis campus.

Rosbash and Hall started at Brandeis together in 1974; Hall is a professor emeritus there.

Scientist who fled Nazis among Nobel Prize in Physics winners

Physicist Rainer Weiss at his home in Newton, Mass., May 13, 2016. (Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Three American scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, including one who fled the Nazis with his parents and another whose grandparents were Polish immigrants.

Rainer Weiss, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of the California Institute of Technology, were awarded the prize on Tuesday for the discovery gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space and time that help scientists explore objects in space.

Weiss won half of the $1.1 million prize, with Barish and Thorne sharing the other half.

The Nobel winners and the late Ron Dreyer, also of Caltech, founded the international collaboration of physicists and astronomers known as LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. In February 2016, they announced that they had recorded gravitational waves emanating from the collision of a pair of black holes a billion light years away.

Drever died this year; the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

Weiss, 85, was born in Berlin to a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father. The family fled Berlin for Prague when Weiss was a baby because his father was Jewish and a member of the Communist Party. After the Munich agreement in 1938, the family left Prague for the United States. Weiss earned his doctorate from MIT and in 1964 joined its faculty.

Barish, 81, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Los Angeles, the son of Lee and Harold Barish, the children of Polish immigrants to the United States. He earned his doctorate in 1962 from the University of California, Berkeley, and joined Caltech in 1963.

Thorne, 77, received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1965 and joined Caltech in 1967.

Top photo: Brandeis University biology professor Michael Rosbash is one of the winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Medicine. (Courtesy/Brandeis University)