HOWARD (CHAIM) CEDAR
Professor of Molecular Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel© REUVEN KASTROIn 1963, when Howard Cedar was a junior-year physics major at MIT, a specific event changed the course of his life, he says. He had just gotten back a graded exam in an atomic physics course. “I got a 95 percent, but when I went over the exam, I noticed that for one of the questions, I had done the calculations correctly yet had written an answer that was about 30 orders of magnitude from the correct answer. The professor had seen that I had done the calculations and had just made a mistake in the final answer and I got almost full credit. But when I saw that, I said to myself, ‘How can you call yourself a physicist if you don’t know the difference between one and 10 to the power of 30? Something’s wrong here! I realized I was only getting by in physics because I was good at math,” says Cedar, now a professor of molecular biology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
“Today, when we don’t know what causes a disease, we say it’s likely epigenetic. In a sense, I think this epigenetic viewpoint is right, but we need much more evidence to get a defined picture.”
Cedar then changed his plan to become a physicist and applied to medical school. “It was a practical decision. I thought I could be a good enough doctor.” Cedar entered New York University (NYU) in 1964. When he arrived, he learned about a brand-new six-year program initiated by the US government to support the training of MD/PhDs. “This was the first year of the program. I only heard about it when I arrived at NYU and leapt at the chance because the program paid for students’ tuitions. My parents were ...
