Dr. Robert A. Weinberg is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Director of the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is an internationally recognized authority on the genetic basis of human cancer.
Dr. Weinberg and his colleagues isolated the first human cancer-causing gene, the ras oncogene, and the first known tumor suppressor gene, Rb, the retinoblastoma gene. The principal goal of his current research program is to determine how cancer cells collaborate with normal cells to create viable tumors and ultimately metastases. Much of his current research is focused more specifically on how primary tumor cells metastasize and how this process depends on the formation of cancer stem cells.
Dr. Weinberg is the author or editor of five books and more than 350 articles. Three of his books intended for a lay audience, are "One Renegade Cell", "Racing to the Beginning of the Road: The Search for the Origin of Cancer" and "Genes and the Biology of Cancer," co-authored with Dr. Harold E. Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health. More recently, he has published a textbook “The Biology of Cancer”, which is intended for doctoral students learning about this disease. He is an elected Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Among Dr. Weinberg's honors are the Discover Magazine 1982 Scientist of the Year, the National Academy of Sciences/U.S. Steel Foundation Award in Molecular Biology, the Sloan Prize of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, the Bristol-Myers Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research, the Landon Prize of the American Association for Cancer Research, the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the Keio Medical Foundation Prize, and the 1997 National Medal of Science. He has served on scientific advisory boards for the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1942, Dr. Weinberg received his B.S. (1964) and Ph.D. (1969) degrees in Biology from MIT. He did postdoctoral research at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and then returned to MIT in 1972. In 1982, he was appointed Professor of Biology at MIT and also became one of the five founding Members of the Whitehead Institute. He has been an American Cancer Society Research Professor at Whitehead and MIT since 1985.
