Robert Elliot Pollack is an American biologist whose interests cross many academic lines. He grew up in Brooklyn, attended public schools, and majored in physics at Columbia University, where he graduated from the College in 1961. He received a PhD in Biological Sciences from Brandeis University in 1966, and subsequently was a postdoctoral Fellow in Pathology with Howard Green at NYU Medical center, and at the Weizmann Institute in Israel with Ernest Winocour. He was then recruited to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory by James Watson to establish a research program on reversion of cancer cells. He became a tenured Associate Professor of Microbiology at the Stony Brook University Medical Center before returning to Columbia as a Professor of Biological Sciences in 1978. He served as Dean of Columbia College from 1982 to 1989, overseeing the enrollment of women in the College for the first time.
He remains at Columbia as a Professor of Biological Sciences, and also serves as Director of The University Seminars; he is the fifth Director since its founding in 1944. He is also a member of the Affiliate Faculty of the American Studies Program. From 1999-2012, he was the Director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion, a program within Columbia’s Earth Institute. In 2014 his interest in questions that lie at the intersection of science and subjectivity, coupled with the gift of an endowment from College alumnus Harvey Krueger ’51, led him to establish the Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity, a project within Columbia’s Center for Science and Society.
In addition to these activities, Pollack has authored many research reports, reviews, articles, and opinion pieces on molecular biology, medical ethics and science education. For the academic year 1993–1994 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in science writing. He has written or edited ten books, including Signs of Life: the Language and Meanings of DNA (1994), which won the Lionel Trilling Award and has been translated into six languages, The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Order, meaning and free will in modern science (2000), and The Missing Moment: How the unconscious shapes modern science (1999).
Education and early life
Robert Elliot Pollack was born on September 2, 1940, in Brooklyn, NY, growing up in the south Brooklyn neighborhood of Seagate. His parents had not finished high school; his father ran a factory, manufacturing cardboard boxes. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School and studied at Columbia College, graduating in 1961 with a physics major. While at Columbia, he was a member of Jester of Columbia and Columbia Daily Spectator. He took a freshman Core Course with Robert Belknap, whom he later succeeded as the Director of University Seminars at Columbia University. His favorite professors were Sidney Morgenbesser and Richard Neustadt, who taught philosophy and government, respectively. He worked as a laboratory assistant under the direction of Arno Penzias, then a graduate student in the lab of Charles H. Townes. Upon graduation, Pollack received a New York State Regents Teaching Fellowship to pursue graduate work at Brandeis University, examining differential expression of leucine transfer RNA in different strains of Escherichia coli following T2 or T4 virus infection.
Research
In 1968, Pollack published the first demonstration of reversion, wherein certain cancer cells demonstrated decreased growth and increased contact inhibition, thereafter being considered as reverted to a more normal non-oncogenic phenotype. Reversion was later suggested as a potential cancer treatment, based on drugs selecting for stable revertant cells. Pollack's work sparked a novel subfield of cancer research, elucidating the distinct mechanisms directing cell reversion.
Academic Career
Microbiologist
Graduating with a PhD in Biology from Brandeis University in 1966, he spent sixteen years as a research scientist, completing postdoctoral work at both N.Y.U. Medical Center and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, serving as a senior scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1971 to 1975, becoming an Associate Professor of Biology at Stonybrook University from 1975 to 1978, and finally running his own laboratory as a full Professor of Biology at Columbia University.
Dean of Columbia College
Pollack served as Dean of Columbia College from 1982 to 1989. At the time of his appointment, the College was firmly within the Sovern era, facing a severe financial crisis, student protests related to South African divestment and concerns regarding the quality of student life, following the institution of co-education and subsequently rising admissions rates.