Aaron Novick

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Aaron Novick (June 24, 1919 – December 21, 2000) was an American molecular biologist and one of the founders of the field. In 1959 he started the University of Oregon’s Institute of Molecular Biology, believed to be the first institute in the world dedicated to molecular biology.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, to Polish immigrant parents, Novick studied chemistry at the University of Chicago, earning a BS in 1940 and a PhD in physical organic chemistry in 1943. His doctoral work covered the kinetics of chromic acid oxidation of isopropyl alcohol and the iodination of fibroin.

After his PhD, he joined the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, later moving to Los Alamos to help prepare for the Trinity nuclear test in 1945. After the war, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory on tritium and helium-3.

In 1947 he became an associate professor at the University of Chicago, where he teamed with Leo Szilard. They helped invent the chemostat, a device to control microbial growth, and developed methods to measure bacterial growth. They also discovered feedback inhibition, a key control mechanism in metabolism. He married Jane Graham in 1948 and had two sons.

In 1953 Novick spent a year at the Pasteur Institute in Paris as a Guggenheim Fellow. He left Chicago in 1958 and, on January 1, 1959, became director of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon. He built the institute into a major research center and hired scientists, advancing work on how genes are turned on and off. He showed that turning on a gene leads to messenger RNA synthesis, while turning it off requires a protein to bind to the gene—an essential idea in molecular biology.

Novick served in leadership roles at Oregon, including Dean of the Graduate School and head of the Biology Department, while continuing his work at the Institute of Molecular Biology. He retired in 1984 and became professor emeritus in 1990. In later life he faced Parkinson’s disease and died of pneumonia in Eugene, Oregon, in 2000. He was survived by his ex-wife and two sons. He is remembered for his remark on a memorial, “Tell them I was honest and a Democrat.”