Biography

He was born in 1937 in Karcag and lived in his hometown until he was seven years old. His father, Mózes Herskó, was a teacher at the Jewish school in Karcag, but in 1944, he was conscripted into forced labor and later taken as a prisoner of war by the Soviets. He did not return home until the summer of 1947.After the German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944, the family was first taken to the local ghetto and then transported to Szolnok. While the majority of those deported from Szolnok were sent to Auschwitz, Ferenc, along with his mother and brother, were accidentally placed in a transport that, for reasons still unknown, was taken to Strasshof an der Nordbahn, near Vienna. After the war, they returned to Karcag.Once his father returned from captivity, the family moved to Budapest, and in 1950, they emigrated to Israel.

Career

He earned his medical degree in 1965 and his PhD in 1969 from the Hadassah Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Following this, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher for two years in San Francisco. He is currently a professor at the Rappaport Family Institute for Research at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa and a professor of pathology at New York University. In 2000, he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award. In 2004, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.