Gerald Litwack

Gerald (Gerry) Litwack, born in Boston, MA and raised in Springfield, MA, attended Classical High School and Hobart College along with five other civilians in a class with veterans of World War 2. He received the PhD in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin and remained as an Instructor in Enzymology before starting postdoctoral research at the Biochemical Institute of the Sorbonne in Paris. Towards the end of the Korean War, he became an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Rutgers University and, later, an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Medicine. Following that, he was appointed Professor and Deputy Director of the Fels Institute of Cancer Research and Molecular Biology at the Temple Medical School, winning the Faculty Research Award and being named as the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Biochemistry. Later, he moved to the Jefferson Medical College as Chair of Pharmacology and Deputy Director of The Kimmel Cancer Institute and, subsequently, the Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology and Vice Dean for Research. In 2003, he moved to Los Angeles to join part of his family (wife Ellie, a poet, daughter, Kat, an actress and son, Geoff, a writer) and was appointed as Visiting Scholar in the Department of Biological Chemistry, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles before coming to the new medical school in northeastern Pennsylvania, The Commonwealth Medical College, as Founding Chair of the Department of Basic Sciences. Before leaving Los Angeles for Pennsylvania, he wrote a 1254-page volume entitled "Human Biochemistry and Disease", published by Academic Press/Elsevier. Lately, he has started a novel and has progressed to chapter 37; it will take about 50 chapters to finish. His youngest children have requested biographical information and 14 installments have been completed for them, bringing the story of his life up to the middle 1980s; hopefully, that assignment will be completed at some point.