Ruth Nussenzweig, Who Pursued Malaria Vaccine, Dies at 89
Ruth Nussenzweig, who for a halfcentury pursued one of medical science’s most elusive goals, a vaccine for malaria, helping to bring the research from the seems-impossible stage to the brink of a breakthrough, died on April 1 in Manhattan. She was 89.
Her son Michel said the cause was a pulmonary embolism.
Dr. Nussenzweig (pronounced NU-senschwige), working at the Langone Medical Center at New York University, did groundbreaking work on malaria beginning in the 1960s, a time when many thought the complexities of that killer disease prevented it from being thwarted through vaccination. At her death, pilot programmes on a malaria vaccine, based in part on Dr. Nussenzweig’s work, were to begin in Africa. Getting to that point required more than just hard work in the lab by Dr. Nussenzweig, who sometimes collaborated with her husband, Victor Nussenzweig, another eminent researcher.
It required her to emigrate, and then emigrate again, to escape oppression: She left Austria during the Nazi occupation, then Brazil when it came under a military dictatorship.
“All this was a lesson of survival that strengthened my resources and hardened my will to be a scientist,” she told Science magazine in 2013.
Ruth Sonntag was born on June 20, 1928, in Vienna. Her parents, Barouch and Eugenia, were physicians.
The family, although not particularly religious, was of Jewish lineage, which left them vulnerable after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938.
“My mother told the story of how her family were relatively wealthy Jews who were assimilated with many non-Jewish friends and connections,” Michel Nussenzweig said by email.
“They did not believe that they would be targeted by the Nazis.
However, Barouch, her father, was arrested immediately after the Anschluss. They were able to leave only because a prominent Austrian Nazi friend found my grandmother in line to visit Barouch in prison and recognized her. He was let go, and they fled immediately.” In Brazil, Ruth enrolled in medical school at the University of São Paulo.
“I was interested in research,” she explained, “and the only way of doing research was to go to medical school.” There she met Victor Nussenzweig, a fellow medical student.
“At the time, I was more interested in doing leftist politics than science,” Victor told Science magazine, “but I started dating Ruth, and she convinced me that research would benefit people much more than politics.” They married in 1952. Ruth Nussenzweig received her medical degree in 1953. She and Victor became assistant professors at the university and from 1958 to 1960 worked in Paris on a research fellowship. He survives her. NY Times