Paul Zamecnik

Paul Charles Zamecnik (1912- ) is an American scientist, Professor of Medicine Emeritus, Harvard Medical School and Senior Scientist, Massachusetts General Hospital, who, with Mahlon Hoagland, co-discovered tRNA, and was later credited as the inventor of antisense therapeutics. Throughout his career, Zamecnik earned over a dozen US patents for his therapeutic techniques. He still maintains a lab at MGH where he presently studies the application of synthetic oligonucleotides (antisense hybrids) for chemotherapeutic treatment of drug resistant and XDR tuberculosis.

Paul Zamecnik was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He attend Dartmouth College, majored in Chemistry and Zoology, and received his AB degree in 1933. He then attended Harvard Medical School and received his MD degree in 1936. After internship at Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland, he was awarded a Finney-Howell Fellowship and a Moseley Traveling Fellowship to go to the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen where he worked with Dr. Kai Linderstrom-Lang. His planned time in Copenhagen was cut short because of WWII and he and his wife, Mary Connor, returned to Boston in 1940 where he became an Assistant Physician at the Huntington Memorial Hospital, whose Director was Joseph Aub. After a year in New York at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research studying protein synthesis with Max Bergman, he returned to Harvard in 1942 to join the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School where he became Instructor and then Professor of Medicine. He has authored or co-authored 210 peer-reviewed scientific articles. He has won many distinguished awards, including the National Cancer Society National Award in 1968, National Medal of Science in 1991, and the first-ever Lasker Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. Zamecnik is also a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Society of Biological Chemistry, American Association for Cancer Research (President 1965-66), Association of American Physicians, Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the American Philosophical Society. Zamecnik married Mary Connor in 1936 (deceased 2005), and together they had 3 children.