COHEN, SEYMOUR STANLEY

COHEN, SEYMOUR STANLEY (1917– ), U.S. biochemist. Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received a B.Sc. degree at CCNY in 1936 and a Ph.D. at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1941. He was a National Research Council Fellow in plant virology with Wendell Stanley at the Rockefeller Institute and then explored the properties of the typhus vaccine for the Army during World War II. In 1945 and 1946 he began his biochemical studies of bacteriophage multiplication in the Department of Pediatrics of the University of Pennsylvania. Following research with André Lwoff at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1947 and 1948, and research and teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he was appointed American Cancer Society (ACS) Research Professor of Biochemistry in 1957, and chairman of the Department of Therapeutic Research in 1963. After initiating studies on nucleoside analogues and on polyamines, he continued work on these subjects from 1971 to 1976 as ACS Professor of Microbiology at the University of Colorado Medical School, and from 1976 to 1985 as Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1985 he retired to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His studies on plant and bacterial viruses led to discoveries on the structure, composition, and metabolism of viral nucleic acids. He was the codiscoverer of a new phage pyrimidine and its biosynthesis, thereby describing a new set of viral functions, which were presented in his 1968 book Virus-Induced Enzymes. This phenomenon has become significant in viral reproduction generally and a key to the treatment of human viral diseases such as AIDS, herpes infections, and influenza. Cohen's studies with polyamines resulted in two books, An Introduction to the Polyamines, presented at the Collège de France in 1970, and A Guide to the Polyamines (1998). Cohen was elected to the American National Academy of Sciences in 1967. In later years he took a working interest in the history of early American science. (Sharon Zrachya (2nd ed.)