55 Facts About Stanley Falkow

Stanley "Stan" Falkow was an American microbiologist and a professor of microbiology at Georgetown University, University of Washington, and Stanford University School of Medicine.

Stanley Falkow formulated molecular Koch's postulates, which have guided the study of the microbial determinants of infectious diseases since the late 1980s.

Stanley Falkow spent over 50 years uncovering molecular mechanisms of how bacteria cause disease and how to disarm them.

Stanley Falkow was one of the first scientists to investigate antimicrobial resistance, and presented his research extensively to scientific, government, and lay audiences explaining the spread of resistance from one organism to another, now known as horizontal gene transfer, and the implications of this phenomenon on our ability to combat infections in the future.

Stanley Falkow was born into a Yiddish-speaking household in Albany, New York.

Stanley Falkow's father was a shoe salesman and had immigrated from Soviet Kyiv, Ukraine.

Stanley Falkow's mother came from a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland.

Stanley Falkow "rented several of their bedrooms and later opened a corset shop".

Stanley Falkow's family was working-class to poor as he described in his memoir.

Stanley Falkow worked at a toy shop in order to collect enough money to buy a model microscope, as well as admitted to stealing textbooks, one a nurse's book on infectious diseases, in order to explore microbiology as a career path despite his family's financial situation.

Stanley Falkow attributed his early interest in microbiology to reading Microbe Hunters in 1943, when he was 11 years old, which he found at the public library after the family had moved to Newport, Rhode Island.

Stanley Falkow described himself as an average student, and below average at mathematics, which he later rectified by working through workbooks of high school and college level mathematics later in his career, after earning his Ph.

Stanley Falkow enrolled in biology at the University of Maine, because of their microbiology department.

Stanley Falkow avoided movie theaters and crowded places between 1955 and 1983 and dropped out of his first attempt at graduate school because of recurring panic attacks.

Stanley Falkow returned to Rhode Island to live with his parents and work at the Newport Hospital as a technician, focusing on bacteriology and processing and examining patient samples.

Stanley Falkow re-enrolled in graduate school at Brown University and graduated with a PhD in 1961.

Washington was older and more experienced than Stanley Falkow, but was assigned to be Stan's technician.

Stanley Falkow worked with Shigella species and contracted dysentery, which lead to hospitalization, after being exposed to infected monkey feces flung at his face by an infected monkey.

Multiple times through his training and early career more senior scientists, some Nobel prize winners, recommended that Stanley Falkow focus more on mechanisms of gene expression and less on pathogens because "nobody cares about typhoid".

Stanley Falkow remained interested in pathogens despite many warnings from his peers and supervisors that infectious diseases were not interesting and were becoming less frequent in wealthy countries and were therefore a diminishing field of study.

Stanley Falkow showed that organisms, such as Shigella, can possess DNA fragments called plasmids which exist apart from the bacterial chromosome, and that they carry specialized information for survival.

Stanley Falkow later moved to Seattle to join the faculty of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Stanley Falkow co-authored a proposal for uniform nomenclature for bacterial plasmids.

Stanley Falkow was married to Rhoda Ostroff in January, 1958 with whom he had two daughters.

Stanley Falkow and Tompkins met while he was a professor at Georgetown University, and she was a medical student who sought Stanley Falkow out to work in his lab.

At first, Stanley Falkow denied the opportunity to Tompkins, claiming that he would not take female graduate students because he was not comfortable having a female student, which was common in the scientific field in the 1960s.

Stanley Falkow's argument forced Stan to reconsider his bias and he then allowed her to enter his laboratory as a trainee.

Stanley Falkow later became an advocate and ally of gender equality in science and helped encourage many women to pursue scientific careers.

Stanley Falkow described his struggle with his mental health as an "uneasy truce" with his "demons" later on in his career as he learned various coping mechanisms.

Stanley Falkow kept his condition a secret from his colleagues during his early career, only privately revealing to Arthur Saz, the chair of microbiology at Georgetown University School of Medicine, that he received and benefited from psychoanalysis treatment.

In 2004 Stanley Falkow was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome and given a prognosis of two years.

Stanley Falkow died on May 5,2018, at the age of 84 at his home in Portola Valley, California, of myelodysplastic syndrome.

Stanley Falkow's death was announced and lifetime achievements highlighted in obituaries in The New York Times, Washington Post, Nature, Science, in a press release from the Americain Society of Microbiology and in various international news sources.

Stanley Falkow has been referred to as the "father of molecular microbial pathogenesis", the study of how infectious microbes and host cells interact to cause disease at the molecular level.

Stanley Falkow adopted the perspective of viewing infection as a process that is ultimately dependent on both the infecting agent and the host.

Stanley Falkow discovered that infectious microbes employ genes that are activated only inside host cells.

Stanley Falkow's work carries clinical applications, such as a new vaccine for whooping cough.

Stanley Falkow then collaborated with Mexican scientists Emma Galindo and Jorge Olarte to investigate new forms of penicillin resistance in Shigella isolates from pediatric patients in Mexico City, which lead to the discovery of new forms of "R factors" - genes responsible for antimicrobial resistance.

Stanley Falkow established 'Molecular Koch's postulates' for defining virulence determinants, which continues to influence thinking and experimental design in infectious disease research.

Stanley Falkow valued and enjoyed teaching as a fundamental part of scientific training and believed that all scientists have a duty to teach and train the next generation.

When Stanley Falkow became an emeritus Professor at Stanford University, he still taught students.

Stanley Falkow organized the first international symposium of invited speakers on antimicrobial resistance.

Stanley Falkow served on the first NIH Recombinant DNA committee to recommend policy guidelines for the use of recombinant DNA to the United States of America Congress.

Many of Stanley Falkow's publications are referenced in the Recombinant DNA Regulation Act of 1977.

Stanley Falkow worked with the FDA of the United States throughout his career to advocate for the decrease of antimicrobial agents used in livestock feed.

Stanley Falkow was elected President of the American Society for Microbiology from July 1997 through June 1998.

Stanley Falkow was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1997 and received the Maxwell Finland Award from the National Foundation of Infectious Diseases in 1999.

Stanley Falkow received in 1999 an Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, and the University of Maine Alumni Career Award.

Stanley Falkow has received honorary doctorates in Europe and the US.

Stanley Falkow received numerous awards for his achievements in science, including the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Infectious Disease Research, the Altemeier Medal from the Surgical Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Howard Taylor Ricketts Award Lecture at the University of Chicago, and the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize.

Stanley Falkow was an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Stanley Falkow was elected into the UK's Royal Society as a Foreign Member.

In September 2008, Stanley Falkow was awarded the Lasker Award for medical research.

In May, 2016, Stanley Falkow was awarded by Barack Obama the National Medal of Science for his monumental contributions toward understanding how microbes cause disease and resist the effects of antibiotics, and for his inspiring mentorship that created the field of molecular microbial pathogenesis.

Stanley Falkow is known for training many experts in the field of molecular microbiology who then became prominent professors and scientists all over the world, including;.