Jewish Independent Article: "Unique contributions: CFHU honors Canada Gairdner award winners"
Vancouver - November 18, 2011 - Dr. Howard Cedar, professor in the department of developmental biology and cancer research at the Hebrew University, and Dr. Michael Hayden, professor at the University of British Columbia Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT), were honored on Oct. 24 by Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (CFHU) and CMMT at a reception in Vancouver at the home of Jackie and Horatio Kemeny.
Three days later, on Oct. 27, both scientists were presented with 2011 Canada Gairdner Awards at the Gairdner Foundation annual awards dinner held at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
The foundation was established in 1957 to both acknowledge the achievements of top medical researchers throughout the world and to increase awareness of the value of health research. According to Gairdner Foundation president and scientific director Dr. John Dirks – who flew in from Toronto to attend the Vancouver reception – Gairdner “has always had an arm’s length scientific committee with the instructions to go and pick the best people in the world.”
As a measure of the Gairdner awards’ significance to global biomedical scientific research, 78 recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, including this year’s co-winners of the Nobel in physiology or medicine, the late Ralph Steinman, who won the Canada Gairdner Award in 2003, and Jules Hoffmann, who received his 2011 Canada Gairdner International Award prior to receiving the news of the 2011 Nobels. Other recent Gairdner award winners to later become Nobel laureates include Thomas Steitz, Andrew Fire, Richard Axel and John Sulston.
As Dr. Peter Hotz, president of the Vancouver chapter of CFHU, noted, “Howard Cedar, in Israel, is a household name.” Born in New York, Cedar studied mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to earn his MD and PhD from New York University. After immigrating to Israel in 1973, where he later became professor of molecular biology at Hebrew University, Cedar continues to work in the laboratory that he has operated for more than 30 years with Prof. Aharon Razin – another 2011 Canada Gairdner Award winner – with whom he pioneered the study of DNA methylation. Their lab has contributed to the understanding of gene regulation, which has enhanced the general understanding of both human development and the molecular basis of numerous diseases.
In his remarks at the reception, Cedar explained, “I’m not so sure that you really know what the Canadian contribution to the Hebrew University Medical School really is, and I invite you all to come to the medical school and see the difference that the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University has actually made.... We thank you all. We’re very, very happy, and we’re very appreciative.”
In his introduction of Hayden, the Hon. David Emerson, former member of Parliament and current member of the CMMT advisory board, said, “If you think about Michael Hayden’s and the researchers at CMMT at UBC and elsewhere, you’re really talking about probably a 10th of one percent, at best, of the population of Canada [who] are really seized by science and research and what it can do for our society and our economy, and none is more seized by that than Michael Hayden.”
Born in South Africa, Hayden earned his medical degree, followed by his PhD in genetics from the University of Cape Town. He then completed a post-doctoral fellowship and training in internal medicine at Harvard Medical School. Hayden, board-certified in both internal medicine and clinical genetics, immigrated to Canada, where he continues to focus his research at UBC on genetic diseases, particularly the genetics of lipoprotein disorders, Huntington’s disease, predictive and personalized medicine. Hayden, together with his research group, has identified 10 disease-causing genes, making Hayden the most cited author in the world for both ABCA1 and Huntington’s.
About Hayden, Dirks said, he “has made a major contribution as a builder and leader in Canada” and, in medicine specifically, Hayden is one of the “top leaders in Canada.” Dirks pointed out that Hayden’s work takes the view that “we study rare diseases so we know how normal function takes place.” Besides his scientific work, Dirks added, Hayden “has been an entrepreneur ... taking a discovery in the lab and saying, What can we do with this, how this can become an innovative product?” Hayden closed the night by thanking everyone who was present, calling them “friends and family” because of their “commitment to Hebrew University and UBC.” He added, “If this kind of relationship can build further bridges in this way, I think we’ll all be really thrilled to see these bridges deeper and fuller, with humor and fun, and also with opportunity to do something significant.”
