Jewish Recipients of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize

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Listed below are recipients of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize who were, or are, Jewish (or of half-Jewish descent, as noted). The Horwitz Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in the medical and life sciences. Approximately one-half of its recipients have subsequently been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Marshall Nirenberg (1968)
Salvador Luria (1969)
Stephen Kuffler¹ (1972)
Harry Eagle (1973)
Theodore Puck (1973)
Boris Ephrussi (1974)
Seymour Benzer (1976)
Charles Yanofsky (1976)
Michael Heidelberger (1977)
Elvin Kabat (1977)
Walter Gilbert (1979)
César Milstein (1980)
Aaron Klug (1981)
Stanley Cohen (1983)
Viktor Hamburger (1983)
Rita Levi-Montalcini (1983)
Michael Brown (1984)
Joseph Goldstein (1984)
Donald Brown (1985)
Mark Ptashne (1985)
Alfred Gilman (1989)
Stephen Harrison (1990)
Michael Rossmann ² (1990)
Stanley Prusiner (1997)
Arnold Levine (1998)
Bert Vogelstein (1998)
Pierre Chambon³ (1999)
H. Robert Horvitz (2000)
Avram Hershko (2001)
Alexander Varshavsky (2001)
James Rothman (2002)
Randy Schekman (2002)
Ada Yonath (2005)
Roger Kornberg (2006)
Rosalind Franklin (2008 Posthumous Honorary Prize)
Arthur Horwich (2008)
Gary Ruvkun (2009)
Michael Rosbash (2011)
Richard Losick (2012)
Lucy Shapiro (2012)
S. Lawrence Zipursky (2015)
Howard Cedar (2016)
Gary Felsenfeld (2016)
Aharon Razin (2016)
Jeffrey I. Gordon (2017)
Pierre Chambon³ (2018)
Ronald Evans (2018)
Drew Weissman (2021)

NOTES
1. Stephen Kuffler, known as the "father of modern neuroscience," was described as having had a Jewish paternal grandmother by his colleague Nobel Prize winner Sir Bernard Katz and as having had "one Jewish grandfather" by his former student Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel. In fact, all four of Kuffler's grandparents were Jews, although he was baptized into the Reformed Church of Hungary and identified as a Roman Catholic most of his life. His paternal grandparents were Benjamin and Flora (née Mittelmann) Kuffler; his maternal grandparents were Adolf and Julia (née Schlesinger) Kohn. (Contrary to other biographical information, his mother was born Elsa (or Elza) Kohn, not Elsa Kertesz.) Kuffler's paternal grandparents are buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Györ, Györ-Moson-Sopron, Hungary. His uncle Paul (Pal) Kuffler, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944, is buried in the Kozma Street Jewish Cemetery in Budapest.
2.Jewish mother, non-Jewish father according to interview in Bitter Prerequisites: A Faculty for Survival from Nazi Terror, by William Laird Kleine-Ahlbrandt (Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, IN, 2001, p. 48).
3. Jewish mother, née Yvonne Weill.

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