Angelika Amon, a cell biologist at MIT who was known for her research on the cellular effects of aneuploidy, an abnormal number of chromosomes, and their contribution to tumor formation, died October 29 from ovarian cancer. She was 53 years old.
“More than anyone else I’ve ever met, she was an absolute force of nature,” says MIT biologist Matthew Vander Heiden, whose lab was adjacent to Amon’s and who considered her a close friend. “She just has this larger than life personality—there’s no other way to put it.”
Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1967, Amon had always been interested in biology and animals, setting her sights on pursuing zoology. But in high school, Amon saw an old black-and-white film about chromosome segregation and was taken aback by the sister chromatids splitting apart, according to an MIT obituary. She took this curiosity to the University of Vienna, where she studied genetics. ...
