Harry Rubin (born June 23, 1926 in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

) – February 2, 2020) was an American cell biologist and virologist. He is known for his experimental research on

oncovirus An oncovirus or oncogenic virus is a virus that can cause cancer. This term originated from studies of acutely transforming retroviruses in the 1950–60s, when the term "oncornaviruses" was used to denote their RNA virus origin. With the lette ...

es and how cellular microenvironment and cellular aging affect the regulation of

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...

ous tumors.

Biography

His parents were Jewish immigrants and his father had a grocery store and delicatessen in Manhattan. Harry Rubin graduated in 1947 as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.) from the

New York State College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University The New York State College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University is a college of veterinary medicine at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1894, it is the first statutory college established by the State University of New York ...

. From 1947 to 1948 he served in the joint U.S.-Mexican Aftosa Commission dealing with an outbreak of

hoof-and-mouth disease Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) or hoof-and-mouth disease (HMD) is an infectious and sometimes fatal viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals, including domestic and wild bovid The Bovidae comprise the biological family of cloven-hoofed ...

(''fiebre aftosa'' in Spanish) among cattle in Mexico. From 1948 to 1952 he was stationed in

Montgomery, Alabama Montgomery is the capital city of the U.S. state of Alabama and the county seat of Montgomery County. Named for the Irish soldier Richard Montgomery, it stands beside the Alabama River, on the coastal Plain of the Gulf of Mexico. In the 202 ...

as a commissioned officer of the

United States Public Health Service The United States Public Health Service (USPHS or PHS) is a collection of agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services concerned with public health, containing nine out of the department's twelve operating divisions. The Assistant S ...

. In January 1952 he married Dorothy Margaret Shuster, who was being trained as a flight evacuation nurse in the U.S. Air Force when he met her. In 1952 he was briefly enrolled as a graduate student at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

, but

Wendell Stanley Wendell Meredith Stanley (16 August 1904 – 15 June 1971) was an American biochemist, virologist and Nobel laureate. Biography Stanley was born in Ridgeville, Indiana, and earned a BSc in Chemistry at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. ...

recruited him to work at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

's Virus Laboratory. From 1952 to 1953 Rubin was a research fellow at UC Berkeley. From 1953 to 1958 he was a research fellow at

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

. There he worked in

Renato Dulbecco Renato Dulbecco ( , ; February 22, 1914 – February 19, 2012) was an Italian–American virologist who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oncoviruses, which are viruses that can cause cancer when they infect anima ...

's laboratory and discovered in 1955 that, in a tumor infected with Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), every cell in the tumor is capable of releasing RSV. In 1958 Temin and Rubin published an important paper ''Characteristics of an assay for Rous sarcoma virus and Rous sarcoma cells in tissue culture'' on their breakthrough in developing a tissue culture assay for RSV. At UC Berkeley, Rubin was an associate professor from 1958 to 1960 and a full professor from 1960 to 2001, when he retired as professor emeritus. At UC Berkeley's Virus Laboratory, Rubin, working with postdoctoral fellows, Peter K. Vogt and

Hidesaburo Hanafusa was a Japanese virologist. He shared the 1982 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Harold E. Varmus and J. Michael Bishop for demonstrating how RNA tumor viruses cause cancer, and elucidating their role in combining, rescuing and ...

, demonstrated that

avian sarcoma leukosis virus Avian sarcoma leukosis virus (ASLV) is an endogenous retrovirus that infects and can lead to cancer in chickens; experimentally it can infect other species of birds and mammals. ASLV replicates in chicken embryo fibroblasts, the cells that contri ...

(ASLV) can act as a "

helper virus A helper virus is a virus that allows an otherwise-deficient coinfecting virus to replicate. These can be naturally occurring as with Hepatitis D virus, which requires Hepatitis B virus to coinfect cells in order to replicate. Helper viruses are a ...

" for RSV. This research earned Rubin the 1964

Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research The Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research is one of the prizes awarded by the Lasker Foundation for a fundamental discovery that opens up a new area of biomedical science. The award frequently precedes a Nobel Prize in Medicine; almost 5 ...

(shared with

). Rubin received in 1961 the Eli Lilly Award in Bacteriology and Immunology and in 1963 the Merck Research Award. He was elected in 1978 a member of the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

. He was "a singer and guitar player much in demand at parties." During the 1960s he was active in Berkeley's anti-Vietnam war movement. In the 1970s he became interested in Jewish ethics and the ideas of some Jewish philosophers such as

Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas (; ; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to me ...

Franz Rosenzweig Franz Rosenzweig (, ; 25 December 1886 – 10 December 1929) was a German theologian, philosopher, and translator. Early life and education Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany, to an affluent, minimally observant Jewish family. His fa ...

Joseph B. Soloveitchik Joseph Ber Soloveitchik ( he, יוסף דב הלוי סולובייצ׳יק ''Yosef Dov ha-Levi Soloveychik''; February 27, 1903 – April 9, 1993) was a major American Orthodox rabbi, Talmudist, and modern Jewish philosopher. He was a scion ...

, and

Eliezer Berkovits Eliezer Berkovits (8 September 1908, Nagyvárad, Austria-Hungary – 20 August 1992, Jerusalem), was a rabbi, theologian, and educator in the tradition of Orthodox Judaism. Life Berkovits received his rabbinical training first under Rabbi ...

. Rubin and his wife joined the Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley, and he met regularly with a philosophy discussion group of congregation members. His doctoral students include

Howard M. Temin Howard Martin Temin (December 10, 1934 – February 9, 1994) was an American geneticist and virologist. He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for which he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Phy ...

and

Gail R. Martin Gail Roberta Martin (née Zuckman, born 1944) is an American biologist. She is professor emerita in the Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco. She is known for her pioneering work on the isolation of pluripotent stem cell ...

. Harry and Dorothy Rubin had two sons and two daughters. Upon his death after 68 years of marriage, he was survived by his widow, two sons, one daughter, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. His grave is in Gan Shalom Cemetery,

Contra Costa County, California ) of the San Francisco Bay , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = United States , subdivision_type1 = State , subdivision_name1 = California , subdivision_type2 ...

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rubin, Harry 1926 births 2020 deaths American veterinarians American virologists Cancer researchers Jewish American scientists Cornell University alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty Recipients of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences California Institute of Technology fellows