摘要: “I am just hitting my stride,” says immunologist Judy Lieberman, while discussing her multiple research projects. The former high-energy theoretical physicist is now a chairperson of cellular and molecular medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2020, Lieberman is a pioneer in the therapeutic uses of RNA interference. She showed in an animal disease model that small RNAs can be used as a therapy and developed methods for delivering small RNAs selectively to particular cell types. Her achievements also include elucidating the molecular basis of killer lymphocyte cytotoxicity and identifying the role of microRNAs in development and cancer. Her Inaugural Article (1) reports a strategy for cancer immunotherapy that uses cancer cell-targeted gene knockdown to counteract the many ways tumor cells evade immune recognition. Judy Lieberman. Image credit: Judy Lieberman. Lieberman was born in Boston and raised in the New York City area. Her father was a businessman, while her mother was an elementary school teacher. She says, “I grew up in a very intellectual family, but not of scientists, although my uncle was a professor of biochemistry and member of the NAS. My parents were early feminists, who strongly believed that girls could do anything that boys could do.” The 1957 launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, heightened interest in science and led to expansion of youth educational programs. Lieberman benefited from this surge of interest while in high school, participating in a sciences and arts summer camp supported by the Ford Foundation, a Saturday science honors program at Columbia University, and a National Science Foundation (NSF) program in modern physics at Cornell University. “The NSF program turned me onto physics,” she says. After earning a bachelor’s degree summa cum …