Samuel Broder spent his childhood in Poland, in a group of Jewish guerrillas threatened by the Nazis. He emigrated to the United States with a group of Polish survivors and settled with his parents in an industrial neighborhood in Detroit, where they ran a snack bar that was razed to the ground during the riots in 1968 for the assassination of Martin Luther King. Broder didn’t like to work there, he had different goals. He thought that in science he could succeed without belonging to a high socioeconomic class, so he began to get good grades in science subjects and got a scholarship to Michigan State University. He was a co-developer of some of the first effective drugs for the treatment of AIDS and was Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) from 1989 to 1995. During the first years of the AIDS epidemic, he co-developed zidovudine (AZT), didanosine (ddI), and zalcitabine (ddC), which were the first effective drugs licensed for the treatment of AIDS. In 1989, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to be Director of the NCI. In this position he oversaw the development of a number of new therapies for cancer including paclitaxel (Taxol). After leaving the NCI, Dr. Broder became Senior Vice President for Research and Development at the IVAX Corporation in Florida, a position he held until 1998 when he joined Celera Genomics. He is now Chief Medical Officer of Celera. He has received a number of honors for his work including the Arthur S. Flemming Award and the Leopold Griffuel Award. References External links Dr. Broder's Bio at Celera NIH Oral History of Dr. Broder's role in developing AIDS drugs American medical researchers Living people 1945 births Members of the National Academy of Medicine United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps admirals United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps officers United States Public Health Service personnel