Professor Howard Cedar Essay

Professor Howard Cedar was born in the United States in New York in 1943.He received his BSc in Mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in 1970 he received his MD and PhD in microbiology from New York University. From 1970 to 1973 he worked for the U.S. Army’s Public Health Service and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland. He is married to Zipporah, a drama therapist, and has six children, one of whom is Joseph Cedar, a film writer and director.

In 1973 he migrated to Israel where he joined the faculty in the Hebrew University and is serving as a professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Genetics of Human Cell and Chairperson of the Department for Developmental Biology and Cancer Research where

Methylation patterns changes during embryonic development to allow silencing of genes which had their jobs finished and allow the activation of genes that are required for further differentiation. Adult human cells, for example, are silenced by the methylation of complete set of genes that allow cells to maintain unlimited differentiation capacity that characterizes embryonic stem cells, so understanding this underlies the creation of iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells) which are now in clinical use to treat diseases and discover specific drug.

All tumors that have ever been examined show change in DNA methylation. Cedar has shown that cancer cells have targeted methylation of CG Islands which control transcription of tumor suppressor genes, methylation silences these genes and allows the cancer cells to proliferate, so this observation should help in the development of new approaches for targeting, thereby, preventing the fundamental pathology of