Leo Sachs

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Leo Sachs (born 1924) is a German-born Israeli molecular biologist and cancer researcher. Born in Leipzig, he immigrated to England in 1933, and to Israel in 1952. There he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he founded the Department of Genetics.

In 1980 Sachs became the first Israeli scientist to win the Wolf Prize – for his "contributions to knowledge of the function and disfunction of the body cells through [his] studies on ... the elucidation of mechanisms governing the control and differentiation of normal and cancer cells". Other honors have included the Israel Prize (1972), and election as a Foreign Associate to the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) (1995).

In 1996 Sachs received the Ot Hanagid (Medal of the Governor) award, presented annually by Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center, for his pioneering work in cancer research. The presentation noted that "He discovered and identified a group of proteins among them colony-stimulating factors and some interleukins that control the viability and growth of blood stem cells and their development into different types of mature blood cells." It noted further that his "research in the 1950's on the use of amniotic fluid to diagnose a fetus s genetic properties has formed the basis for today's prenatal diagnosis of human diseases."[1]

Leo Sachs is literally a towering presence. He is 6'8'' (2.03m) tall.