A charmed life.

Boris Magasanik was born in Kharkoff, Ukraine, on December 19, 1919. He received his preliminary and secondary education in Vienna, Austria, and studied chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1937. He continued his studies at City College, New York (BS, 1941) and after one semester of graduate study at Pennsylvania State University, served in the US Army in England and France from 1942-1945. He obtained his PhD degree in biochemistry from Columbia University in 1948. A faculty member in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at Harvard Medical School from 1951 to 1960, he then continued his career as Professor of Microbiology at MIT where he served as head of the Department from 1967 to 1977. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA in 1969 and received the Selman A Waksman Award in 1993. He is currently the Jacques Monod Professor Emeritus at MIT and is the author of over 240 publications dealing with microbial physiology and the regulation of gene expression in bacteria and yeast.