Three American Jewish scientists have been awarded Nobel Prizes for 1985. They are Profs. Joseph Goldstein and Michael Brown, both of the University of Texas, sharing the Prize for Medicine and Physiology; and Prof. Franco Modigliani of MIT, for Economics.
Joseph Leonard Goldstein, 45, was born in Sumter, S.C. to Isidore and Fannie Goldstein. He has been to Israel several times in connection with the medical research he and Brown have been collaborating on at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas.
Michael Stuart Brown, 44, was born to Harvey and the late Evelyn Brown in New York City. He met Goldstein when the two men were both medical interns at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and came to Dallas 10 years ago to work with him.
Brown and his wife, Alice Lapin Brown, belong to Shearith Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Dallas where their young daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah, attend Hebrew school. He told reporters he would use his share of the $225,000 award that comes with the Nobel Prize for their college education.
The work that won Goldstein and Brown the Prize is in cholesterol research. The Nobel Committee called their discovery a “milestone,” saying that it had “revolutionized our knowledge” about how the body processes cholesterol, including the role genetics and diet play in its buildup in the blood.
Franco Modigliani was born in 1918 in Rome. His father, Enrico, was a physician, and his mother, Olga Flaschel Modigliani, was a volunteer social service worker. After receiving a doctorate in law from the University of Rome in 1939, he fled Italy and its fascist regime and arrived in the U.S., where he received a doctorate in social science from the New School for Social Research in 1944. He joined the MIT faculty in 1962 and is currently Institute Professor at its Sloan School of Management.
Modigliani was awarded the Nobel Prize for “his pioneering analyses of saving and financial markets” which, the Committee said, constituted the “definitive breakthrough for the theory of corporate finance.” His work, which goes back to the late 1950’s , is considered to have provided the basis for modern corporate finance.
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