Igor Dawid was born in 1935 in the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, the only son of Joseph and Pepi Dawid. Igor was a Holocaust survivor; his family narrowly escaped several round-up operations by the Nazis. After the war, the family returned to Vienna, Austria. Igor earned a Ph. D, in Chemistry from University of Vienna in 1960, after which he moved to the USA for postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After his postdoc he was recruited to the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore as a Senior Scientist, where he and his colleagues Donald Brown and Ronald Reider made groundbreaking observations on the molecular mechanisms of early embryonic development, notably on the discovery of ribosomal RNA gene amplification in frog oocytes and of mitochondrial DNA. In 1978, he was recruited to the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1981 he was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) where he continued to make important discoveries on early development until his retirement in 2016. Igor also made important contributions to the administration of the NICHD Division of Intramural Research, including serving as head of the Program in Genomics of Differentiation and as acting NICHD Scientific Director. Igor was a member of National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he served as Editor in Chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for Developmental Biology. He received the Society for Developmental Biology Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 for his exceptional contributions to our understanding of the molecular underpinnings of development.
Igor was a passionate lover of the arts, and particularly enjoyed classical music including Mozart, Schubert, and opera of almost any sort. He died peacefully on February 13, 2024 after a six-year battle with Parkinson’s Disease.