Hidesaburo Hanafusa 1929–2009

With his passing, the scientific community lost a giant whose monumental achievements were matched only by his dignity, humility, honesty, and generosity to collaborators and competitors alike. Scores of former trainees lost a beloved mentor, colleague, and friend, and his family lost a devoted husband, father, and grandfather. During a career that spanned six decades, two centuries , three continents, and several cultures , Hanafusa was a pioneer in virol-ogy and molecular oncology. " Saburo " means third son, and the prefix " Hide " embellishes this with excellence and superiority. It was completely within character that he preferred to be known to students, friends, and colleagues simply as " Saburo. " However, excellence and superiority shine through his nearly 300 publications notable for their originality and experimental precision; he made foundational contributions to our understanding of retroviral genetics, signal transduction, and oncogenesis. His work helped lay the groundwork for the so-called Oncogene Revolution that has begun to dramatically alter approaches to cancer therapy. His laboratory also produced several generations of investigators who have made important contributions to many fields. He will be sorely missed. Saburo was born and educated in Japan. He had a hardscrabble upbringing because of the conditions in Japan during and after World War II. Despite these hardships, intellectual pursuits were central to the family, and Saburo became the avatar of these aspirations. He received his PhD in biochemistry in 1960 from Osaka University, where he also met his late first wife, Ter-uko, the only woman in his class. In addition to their enduring marriage, the couple forged a powerful scientific partnership, initially working on poxvirus replication. By 1961, their interests had shifted to oncogenic retroviruses, and they left Osaka for Harry Rubin's lab at UC Berke-ley to work on Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), an RNA tumor virus that induces sarco-mas in chickens. The startling discovery of a virus that causes cancer was made by Peyton Rous in 1911, but the mechanism of RSV-mediated transformation remained an unsolved problem. Because we are living in a time when hundreds of human cancer genes have been defined, proteins can be sequenced in an afternoon , and genomes sequenced in a week, it is perhaps difficult to appreciate how little was known about the molecular basis of cancer and how crude were the tools available to the Hanafusas when they arrived to work in Rubin's lab. Shortly before their …