Jack Strominger to retire after a lifetime of achievement
Growing up the grandson of Eastern European immigrants in Queens, N.Y., in the 1930s, Jack Strominger excelled in school but didn’t display a profound interest in science in his youth, with the possible exception of the time he blew up a chemistry set at age 14. Strominger started at Harvard in 1942, shy of his 17th birthday, and satisfied all the course requirements for medical school in 20 months. He went on to Yale in 1944 to become a physician and fulfill his parents’ dream. After a series of fateful events, the life of the young physician took an unusual turn, with Strominger landing a fully funded lab at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he experienced the thrill of discovery and scientific excitement that would define his life. He was 26. On a recent afternoon at his office in the Sherman Fairchild building, Strominger, the Higgins Research Professor of Biochemistry in...