Evelyn Witkin
Image by Wikimedia Commons
When Evelyn Witkin received the National Medal of Science from President George W. Bush in 2002, at age 81, she might have suspected that it would be the high point of an illustrious career. Perhaps it would be the icing on the cake of the 2000 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, awarded for distinguished service to the field of genetics.
But in 2015, at a brisk 94, she won not only the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences but the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for her work with Stephen J. Elledge on DNA damage response.
Born Evelyn Maisel in Manhattan, she moved at age 9 to Forest Hills, Queens, after her father’s death. When she started New York University at 16 she was soon politically “hot” and was one of the seven students suspended in 1941 for protesting NYU’s part in discrimination against black athletes.
She started her doctoral work at Columbia, working on genetics at a time when DNA was barely known to be genetic material. She married Herman “Hy” Witkin in 1943 and went to work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where she heard James Watson’s first public talk on the discovery of the double helix.
For 50 years Witkin worked on the ways in which DNA responded to different types of damage, and on its mechanisms of repair. Her research work, her understated manner and her enthusiasm have shaped contemporary genetics.
She reached mandatory retirement in 1991 and is now a professor emerita at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers. Maybe there’s a Nobel Prize yet to come!
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
