I. Robert Lehman

Israel Robert Lehman (October 5, 1924 – June 15, 2026) was a Lithuanian-born American biochemist. His work primarily focused on the study of DNA replication and repair, as well as the replication of phages and the herpes virus. Notably, he collaborated with Arthur Kornberg in the discovery of DNA polymerase and the reaction responsible for genetic material replication. He also made major contributions in characterizing the process of homologous recombination. He served as the head of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University from 1974 to 1979 and again from 1984 to 1986. Lehman was awarded the Merk Prize by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Early life and education Lehman was born in Tauragė, Lithuania, on October 5, 1924. He emigrated to United States in 1927. After serving as a soldier during World War II, he was educated at Johns Hopkins University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1950 and completing his Ph.D. in 1954.

Due to the instability of the newly independent Lithuania and the anti-Semitic environment, his father made the decision for the family to emigrate to the United States in search of a better life. At the age of three, in 1927, he arrived in the American continent. He grew up in the city of Baltimore where other members of his family lived, including his uncle Jacob from his maternal side, who was a chemist and whom he greatly admired. During this time, Kornberg showed him an experiment involving carbon-14-labeled thymidine: when exposing this nucleotide to an E. Coli extract, adding ATP, and allowing the mixture to incubate at 37 degrees for an hour, an acid was added, causing the DNA to precipitate. Upon measuring radioactivity, Kornberg observed that the DNA exhibited radioactivity associated with thymidine, and if deoxyribonuclease, an enzyme that degrades DNA was added, this label disappeared from the precipitate. Lehman's professional career concluded with the completion of 216 publications, but he remained active. He was part of the review teams for scientific journals such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.