Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize - 2008

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Arthur Horwich, MD

Arthur Horwich received undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University, then trained in pediatric medicine at Yale.  As a postdoctoral fellow he studied transforming T antigens at the Salk Institute with Walter Eckhart and Tony Hunter, then returned to Yale for further postdoctoral training with Leon Rosenberg.  The latter studies were directed to understanding posttranslational import of mitochondrial precursor proteins, examining signal peptides in the precursor proteins.  Following appointment to the Yale faculty in Genetics in 1984, he directed his work toward the mitochondrial "machinery" that recognizes and translocates precursor proteins and, in a genetic screen in yeast, uncovered Hsp60 (the yeast homologue of GroEL) as essential for folding newly imported proteins in work in collaboration with Ulrich Hartl.  This led to further studies of chaperonin structure and mechanism using the bacterial GroEL-GroES chaperonin system, including X-ray crystallographic studies with Paul Sigler, cryoEM studies with Helen Saibil, and NMR studies with Kurt Wüthrich.  Currently he is Sterling Professor of Genetics and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  He has been an attending physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Medical Genetics and Pediatrics for the past 20 years.  Honors include 2001 Hans Neurath Award of the Protein Society, 2004 Gairdner International Award, 2006 Stein and Moore Award of the Protein Society, 2007 Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, and 2008 Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Science.  He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.  He is an Associate Editor of Cell and Molecular Cell, and a member of the Editorial Boards of Journal of Cell Biology and Structure.