Isaac Berenblum

Isaac Berenblum was born in 1903 in Białystok

Berenblum was born in Białystok, Poland, in 1903. As a small child he moved with his family to Belgium, where he finished primary school in Antwerp. In 1914 he moved to England and completed his schooling in Bristol.

He began university studies in 1920 at the University of Leeds. He earned a degree in physiology and biochemistry in 1923 and a master's degree in chemistry in 1926. He received a doctorate in medicine in 1930 and in science in 1936.

From 1927 to 1936 he was a research fellow at Leeds. He then joined the School of Pathology at Oxford, where his 1941 research showed that cancer develops in several stages, which he called initiation and promotion. In 1948 he became a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute in the United States.

In 1950 he immigrated to Israel with his family and headed the Department of Experimental Biology at the Weizmann Institute until 1971. He also lectured on oncology at the Hebrew University. He chaired the Israel Cancer Association from 1955 to 1975 and was a founding member of the Israel Academy of Sciences in 1959.

He was married to Doris Lina Bernstein and had 2 daughters. He died in 2000 and was buried in Rehovot.