Mendelsohn also was a driving force for several Houston nonprofit organizations. He chaired the board of directors of the Houston Grand Opera and served as vice chair of the board of BioHouston, Inc., a nonprofit corporation created in 2001 to promote the Houston area as a global competitor in life science and biotechnology commercialization. As a leader of the organization, he worked to advance collaborative research between academia and industry.

The Early Years


Mendelsohn was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 31, 1936, to Joe and Sarah Mendelsohn, in a neighborhood full of close relatives. He attended Walnut Hills High School and went on to earn his bachelor's degree in biochemical sciences magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1958. While there, he was the first undergraduate student to work in the laboratory of a new assistant professor, biochemist James D. Watson, Ph.D., who later won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for identifying the structure of DNA.

Between college and medical school, Mendelsohn spent a year in Scotland as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Glasgow. He graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1963. From 1963 to 1970, he took residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and then completed a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health and a fellowship in hematology-oncology at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis.

Mendelsohn joined the newly established UCSD School of Medicine faculty in 1970 where he became the founding director of the UCSD cancer center. It was during this time that he researched the monoclonal antibody that later became the drug Erbitux, used to treat thousands of head, neck, colorectal and lung cancer patients.

In 1985, Mendelsohn left UCSD to become chair of the Department of Medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he held the Winthrop Rockefeller Chair in Medical Oncology. During his tenure, he was co-head of the Program in Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics, as well as professor and vice chair of medicine at Cornell Weill Medical College. In 1996, he left his posts in New York to become president of MD Anderson.

A Couples' Dedication to Others

Mendelsohn and his wife Anne were very active in the Houston, San Diego and New York communities. "We used the team approach to planning the personal and professional aspects of our lives," Mendelsohn was quoted in an MD Anderson publication. "Teamwork is part of the commitment we made in creating a family and sharing love and life together." The couple received numerous joint awards in recognition of their civic efforts, including the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Award for Public Service, the Houston Technology Center Celebration of Entrepreneurs Award, the Guidepost Magazine Norman Vincent and Ruth Stafford Peale Humanitarian Award and the Teach for America – Houston annual award for advancing education.

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