Richard Kessin

Rich Kessin writes The Body Scientific column for the Lakeville Journal and the Winsted Journal. He was a joint biology and history major at Yale and still combines these interests. He got his Ph.D from Brandeis in 1971, taught genetics at Harvard and for the past thirty-two years has been a professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. He was a past dean of the Ph.D students at the Columbia University Medical Center where he also taught cell biology to medical students for 25 years. His research, funded by the NIH for nearly 40 years, concerned a little amoeba called Dictyostelium or the cellular slime mold.