The key thing to know about me is that I was born Jewish and poor in the East End of London, in Bethnal Green, a mixed Jewish /Christian area, where there was lots of conflict and anti-Semitism.  Also I was born just before WWII, in 1938, and that I experienced the blitz, the German bombing of London when I was an impressionable child.  Also, of unknown effect upon me was the fact that I had an older brother who died at birth two years before I was born because my mother was allowed to remain in labour for two days before a Casaerean section was performed.  The doctor was an Irish Catholic who made anti-Semitic remarks to my father. As far as I know she was fired from the hospital, but remember this was 1936 in England.  I have written about this in my fictionalized autobiographical novel entitled Amanuensis.

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I have had an extensive career as a biomedical researcher, starting with a PhD from Cambridge University under Lord Todd, Nobel Laureate.  I then had a NATO  post-doctoral fellowship at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel, followed by Harvard Medical School and then 3 years at Merck Research Labs, in New Jersey.  I moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda MD, where I stayed in one capacity or another for 21 years (1969-1990). After that I was a Professor of Pharmacology at Georgetown Medical School.  I spent two years as Co-Director of the Biochemistry Program at the NSF in Virginia, before moving to Israel in 1996, where I became the Chief Scientist of the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer Hospital, the largest in Israel (for my full CV see under Science). 

 

From the time we were living in Bethesda, where we bought our first house, until the time we moved to Israel I was painting and writing.  It seemed I needed a stable home life to be able to do this.  My lovely wife Naomi, who I married in London in 1961, and my two wonderful children, Miriam and Simon, gave me this opportunity.  Once I moved to Israel I started painting seriously and also putting together my writings that I started self-publishing in 2009 (see the section on Books).  The rest is history.