Bert Vogelstein grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, home of Johns Hopkins University and its world-famous School of Medicine. Even as a child he was aware of the medical school's great reputation, but as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, he chose to major in mathematics, graduating summa cum laude and winning the school's Rosenbaum Award for undergraduate work in Semitic languages and literature. After briefly pursuing post-graduate studies in mathematics he felt called on to pursue a profession that would help others more directly. He returned to Baltimore to undertake medical studies at Johns Hopkins. He received his medical degree in 1974 and remained at Hopkins for his internship, and for a residency in pediatrics. His first encounters with cancer-stricken children moved him to undertake a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute, where he could explore the latest techniques in molecular biology. The young cancer specialist returned to Johns Hopkins as Assistant Professor of Oncology. At Hopkins, he led the team that discovered the genetic alterations responsible for the development of colorectal tumors, a dramatic breakthrough in cancer research. Dr. Vogelstein is currently the Director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as well as Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. His work has been honored with numerous international awards; he is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the European Molecular Biology Organization. Bert Vogelstein's pioneering studies of the genetic causes of human cancer have placed among the most influential scientists in the world. The Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia has counted more than 170,000 citations of his work in the scientific literature, far more than for any other scientist in any discipline.
| |||||||
