George FEHER

Background

FEHER, George was born on May 29, 1924 in Czechoslovakia. Son of Ferdinand Feher and Sylvia Feher (née Schwartz).

Education

Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics, University California, Berkeley, 1950. Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, University California, Berkeley, 1951. Doctor of Philosophy in Physics, University California, Berkeley, 1954.

Doctor of Philosophy (honorary), Hebrew University Jerusalem, 1994.

Career

His family-name is Hungarian and means white. As a teenager, interested in electronics and crystals, he made experiments and grew crystals in his house. In 1938 he was expelled from school as a Jew, a year before the Nazis came in and the slovak state was established.

In 1941 he made his way overland to Israel (then called Palestine) with a group of other teenagers. In Haifa he worked as radio repairman while taking technical courses. One of his first challenges was to build the Technion's first oscilloscope.

In addition to those two occupations, He worked for the Haganah as electronics expert-one of his tasks dealt with tapping the direct line between the British High commissioner in Jerusalem and 10 Downing Street in London and building Descrambler device. During his time in Israel he read Erwin Schrödinger's what is life? which made him interested in biophysics. In 1944 Feher tried to apply for the Technion but he could not be accepted since he did not graduate high school and due to lack of knowledge of the Bible.

With the encouragement of Ollendorff (promising that a US organization called "The Friends of the Technion" would support Feher's studies), he applied for 50 universities in the US, and only two were willing to accept him. He could not afford the voyage to US so he started a small production line for devices with piezoelectric crystals, mainly microphones. In December 1946 he arrived to New York, where he realized that "Friends of the Technion" would not fund his degree.

With poor means he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his bachelor's degree in engineering physics (1950), master’s degree in electrical engineering (1951) and doctorate (1954). After completing his PhD, he worked as a physicist at Bell Laboratories and Columbia University. In 1960, he became a professor of Physics at University of California, San Diego.

Since then, he has been a professor at UCSD.

His main research was to uncover the basic mechanisms for how plants and bacteria use photosynthesis to convert light into chemical energy. His contributions to science were the development of spectroscopic tools and their applications, in particular, to problems in biochemistry and biophysics. In 2006/07, he was awarded the in Chemistry along with Ada Yonath of Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel for "ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis".

Achievements

• In 2006/07, he was awarded the in Chemistry along with Ada Yonath of Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel for "ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis".

Works

More photos

• book

  • Thoughts on the Holocaust

    (How could it have happened? The question haunted George F...)

    2017
  • Electron paramagnetic resonance with applications to selected problems in biology

Membership

Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science, International EPR/Electron spin resonance Society (Zavoisky award 1996), Biophysical Society. Member American Physical Society (prize 1960, biophysics prize, 1982), Biophysics Society (national lecturer 1983), National Academy of Sciences, American Academy Arts & Sciences (Rumford medal 1992), Sigma Xi.

Interests

• Photography, sports.

Connections

Married Elsa Rosenvasser, June 18, 1961. Children: Laurie, Shoshanah, Paoli.

Father:

Ferdinand Feher

Mother:

Sylvia (Schwartz) Feher

Spouse:

Elsa Rosenvasser

child:

Shoshanah Feher

child:

Paoli Feher

child:

Laurie Feher