Glycobiology awards; honors for Hall; remembering Saffran, Kornberg, Herrmann

In memoriam: Judith Saffran

Judith Saffran, a cancer researcher and a quiet pioneer in women’s postgraduate education, died Jan. 14 in Queens, N.Y. She was 96.

Judith Saffran

Born Judith Cohen in Montreal in 1923, she attended McGill University, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1944 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948. She married Murray Saffran, a fellow McGill student, in 1947 and did postdoctoral research at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital. She taught an advanced biochemistry lab class at McGill for several years.

The Saffrans moved to the U.S. in 1969 and settled in Ohio, where Judith worked as a researcher first at Toledo Hospital and later at what was then the Medical College of Ohio (now the University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences).  Murray founded the department of biochemistry at the college and was a pioneer in the research of stress hormones. He died in 2004.

Judith Saffran and her colleagues examined the binding and metabolic activity of the hormone progesterone, which is crucial to a wide array of biological activity such as neuronal development, steroid production and breast development. It its synthetic forms, progesterone is prescribed as birth control and as menopausal hormonal therapy and gender-affirming therapy. It is also involved in the pathophysiology of breast cancer. To help elucidate this function, Saffran investigated the hormone’s activity in cultures of uterine cells derived from rats and guinea pigs. She also explored the regulatory effect of hormone on the production of other endogenous steroids. She retired from the Medical College of Ohio in 1997.

Saffran, who was descended from a Russian Jewish family, volunteered in the 1990s with the Toledo chapter of ORT, an international charity founded in 19^th century Russia that describes itself as a “global educational network driven by Jewish values.” She moved to New York in 2014 to be closer to her daughter, who was then a professor of biochemistry at Queens College.

Few women of Saffran’s generation had doctoral degrees. “She was a pioneer in women's higher education and in women's work as scientists,” her son David Saffran told the Toledo Blade. “She was also humble. She never thought she was special, and she never bragged about her education and her status as a scientist.”

Saffran is survived by her daughter, Wilma Saffran; sons, David, Arthur, and Richard Saffran; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Boston University

Hans Kornberg in his lab at Boston University.

In memoriam: Hans Kornberg

Boston University biochemist Sir Hans Kornberg died Dec. 16. He was 91.

Born in 1928 to a Jewish family in Germany, Kornberg fled to the United Kingdom in 1939, staying with an uncle in Yorkshire. After finishing grammar school, he gravitated toward chemistry and became a junior laboratory technician for Hans Krebs, who discovered the eponymous metabolic cycle, at the University of Sheffield. Kornberg worked in Krebs’ lab through his time at the university, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1949 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1953.

After postdoctoral stints in the U.S. and U.K. and lecturing at the University of Oxford at Krebs’ behest, Kornberg was appointed as the first chair in biochemistry at the University of Leicester in 1960. He moved to the University of Cambridge in 1975, where he was appointed the Sir William Dunn chair of biochemistry. He also served as the master of Christ’s College, then deputy vice chancellor, until his mandatory retirement in 1995. He then took a job at Boston University, where he continued his research and taught upper-level biochemistry.

Kornberg’s seven-decade research career focused on the regulation of carbohydrate transport in microorganisms. He authored more than 250 papers and notably elucidated the glyoxylate cycle, which is used by plants and other nonanimals to enable the biosynthesis of biomass from 2-carbon compounds, as well as the concept of anaplerosis, an important mechanism for ensuring carbon oxidation by the Krebs cycle.

He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1965 and knighted in 1978. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a foreign associate member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Kornberg met Monica King at Oxford; they married in 1956 and had four children. King died in 1989 and Kornberg remarried in 1991; his wedding with Donna Haber was the first Jewish wedding to take place on the Cambridge campus. He is survived by Haber; his daughters, Julia and Rachel; his twin sons, Jonathan and Simon; grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In memoriam: Robert L. Herrmann

Biochemist Robert L. Herrmann died Dec. 12 at the age of 91. 

Robert Herrmann

Herrmann was born in 1928 in New York City and grew up in Queens. His pursuit of an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Purdue University was interrupted by two years of service in the Navy on the U.S.S. Shenandoah, after which he married his childhood sweetheart, Betty Ann Cook. He then returned to Purdue, finished his degree and enrolled as a graduate student at Michigan State University. In 1956, he accepted a Damon Runyon Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1957, Herrmann joined the American Scientific Affiliation, or ASA, a Christian religious organization of scientists, and remained active in the group for many decades.  There, he met the investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton, with whom he collaborated in writing several books, including Templeton’s biography. Herrmann was a founding member of the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research at the intersection of science and religion.

After completing his postdoctoral fellowship, Herrmann took a faculty position at Boston University, where he taught biochemistry for 17 years. After a stint teaching biochemistry at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Herrmann moved back to New England in 1981 to serve as executive director of the ASA, a position he held until his retirement in 1994.

Herrmann is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Herrmann; sister; Carol; children, Stephen, Karen, Holly and Anders; and eight grandchildren.