Bob Weinberg

Professor of Biology, MIT; Member, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

I grew up in Pittsburgh, the child of immigrants who fled Nazi Germany. At home we spoke largely German, which I retain to this day.  

I went to MIT in 1960 as an undergraduate and majored in biology. I was invited into MIT Biology Department to undertake my pre-doctoral research after a rather mediocre academic performance as an undergraduate.  While in the graduate program, I took off a year (1965-6 to teach in a historically black college in west Alabama and returned to complete my doctoral research under the guidance of Prof. Sheldon Penman.  Thereafter I undertook two post-doctoral training periods, one at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel and the other at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA.  

While at the latter, I was told by Prof. Salvador Luria that I was coming back to MIT to join the faculty.  Thus, I returned to Cambridge and rejoined the Biology Department as a research associate in 1972 and was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1974, joining the then recently created Center for Cancer Research, where I worked between 1974 and 1984 when the Whitehead Institute opened up, which I then joined and where I have been since that time.  

My research has focused on the molecular and biochemical mechanisms of cancer pathogenesis, with emphasis over the past two decades on the mechanisms of cancer cell invasiveness and metastatic dissemination. Our work has been widely recognized, including the awarding of the National Medal of Science by President Clinton in 1997 and the Breakthrough Prize in 2013. My laboratory was the first to demonstrate functional oncogenic sequences in non-virus transformed mouse and human cells (1979-82), the specific point mutation responsible for creating an oncogene from a pre-existing normal human gene (1982), and participated in the isolation of the first human tumor suppressor gene, RB, in 1986.  

Since that time we produced the first experimentally transformed human cell (1999) and demonstrated the involvement of an EMT-inducing transcription factor in the development of metastatic dissemination (2004). I ] also produced two editions of a single-authored textbook written for advanced undergraduates and predoctoral students, The Biology of Cancer, and am in midst of completing the 3rd edition with several colleagues (2022).  I also built a rather large cabin in the woods of New Hampshire (1976-1994).