Joram Piatigorsky

Joram Piatigorsky was born in Elizabethtown, New York, the son of chess player Jacqueline de Rothschild Piatigorsky and legendary cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, émigrés from France at the start of World War II. In 1967, he earned a Ph.D. in developmental biology and chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. His postdoctoral studies with Dr. Alfred J. Coulombre at the National Institutes of Health introduced him to his career in eye research. In 1981, he founded the Laboratory of Molecular and Development Biology at the National Eye Institute (NEI), where he served as chief until 2009. There he established the concept of gene sharing on the basis of the Institute's research on lens crystallins in various vertebrates and invertebrates, such as scallops and jellyfish, that few people even knew had an eye. He generalized and extended the gene-sharing concept in a book, Gene Sharing and Evolution: The Diversity of Protein Functions (2007). He is the co-editor of a book on an international symposium he organized: Molecular Biology of the Eye: Genes, Vision and Ocular Disease. He published more than 300 scientific articles, reviews, and book chapters on vision research. Now an NIH scientist emeritus, Dr. Piatigorsky seeks to promote basic research and the efforts of the NEI through the Joram Piatigorsky Basic Science Lecture and Award Fund at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. Late in his science career, he moved into storytelling in the more traditional sense – writing fiction, essays, and his memoirs. His debut novel was Jellyfish Have Eyes (2014), which blended imagination with his research experiences. It was the first in a trilogy, followed by Roger's Thought-Particles (2021) and Regina's Imagination Universe (2022). In his memoir, The Speed of Dark (2018), Dr. Piatigorsky described how his family's pursuit of excellence influenced and inspired his own scientific career. He has also published two volumes of short stories and a collection of brief essays based on his blogs.