Huda Zoghni, a Howard Hughes Medical Investigation at the Baylor College of Medicine, became on of five researchers to receive a 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Zoghbi got the award, which comes with $3 million in cash, for discovering the genetic cause of two crippling and ultimately fatal disorders, spinocerebellar atazia and Rett syndrome. Winning this prize is, in a sense, the culmination of a decades-long effort, during which she had to surmount scientific challenges, and civil war.
War Begins
Zoghbi, who was born and raised in Lebanon, started medical school in 1975 at the American University in Beirut, which was then considered to be perhaps the finest university in the Middle East. Unfortunately, that was the year Lebanon’s civil war exploded, and Beirut was in the center of the conflict.
