Aharon Razin, Ph.D.

Department Developmental  Biology and Cancer Research, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

"for pioneering discoveries on DNA methylation and its role in gene expression "

2011 Canada Gairdner International Award Recipient

Prof. Aharon Razin was born in 1935 in Tel Aviv, Israel. He received his B.Sc.
from the Hebrew University in 1962 and then went on to do an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in the laboratory of Prof. Yaakov Mager on the subject of nucleotide metabolism. He did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Sinsheimer, and since 1971 has been on the faculty of the Hebrew University where he is currently a full professor in Biochemistry.

Prof. Razin is an elected member of EMBO, is recipient of the Israel Prize for 2004 and became a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences in 2008. He received the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2008 and the Emet Prize in Life Sciences in 2009.

I made my first steps in research as a graduate student under the supervision of the late Prof. Jacob Mager in the Department of Biochemistry of the Hebrew University Medical School. Prof. Mager was a great biochemist and an outstanding mentor. Through the study of purine nucleotide metabolism, I acquired my skills in biochemistry that helped me later throughout my postdoctoral studies in Robert Sinsheimerʼs laboratory in Caltech. It is there that I began my long-lasting career in DNA methylation. I liked the idea of doing pioneering work in a deserted field. First, it allowed me to work quietly with almost no competition upon my return to Israel to
set up my own laboratory. Second, it demanded imagination and special skills to develop novel analytical methods. And most importantly, any outcome of the experiments could be considered as novel discoveries.

In 1973 Howard Cedar immigrated from the United States to Israel. We quickly became friends and started a collaboration that has lasted for more than three decades. Our first joint project was the analysis of DNA methylation in chromatin by taking advantage of my newly developed method for methylation analysis by massspectrometry and Cedarʼs expertise in the field of chromatin. We found that methylcytosine is enriched in nucleosomal DNA. This observation was published in PNAS (Razin and Cedar, 1977) and immediately drew the attention of the molecular biologists interested in chromatin structure and gene expression. Among those interested was Art Riggs who had just published a theoretical article on Xinactivation, differentiation and DNA methylation (Riggs, 1975). Riggs invited me to spend a sabbatical year in his laboratory in California with the intention to assess the scarce data on DNA methylation and discuss new ideas on how to advance the field. This sabbatical year yielded the article on DNA methylation and gene expression that was published in 1980 in Science (Razin and Riggs, 1980). This article became a landmark in methylation research. It introduced the concepts of gene-specific and cell-specific methylation patterns which are established during gametogenesis and embryogenesis and that these specific methylation patterns, once established, are clonally inherited and faithfully maintained. These concepts were later verified by a joint effort of Cedarʼs and my own laboratories.