Moshe Oren

Moshe Oren cloned the p53 gene at the start of the 1980s with David Givol and Arnold Levine, and his laboratory at the Weizmann Institute has worked on it ever since, with Varda Rotter's group alongside. The two groups published back to back in the same issue of Nature in 1984, on pages 646 and 649, showing that p53 cooperates with ras to transform cells, and both read it at the time as an oncogene. It took until the end of that decade for the field to re-read the result: the clones in hand were mutant, and wild-type p53 is a tumour suppressor. That reversal is worth stating plainly rather than tidying away, because what followed from it is the modern position that mutant p53 does not merely lose the old function but acquires new and harmful ones, which is why mutant-p53 reactivators and selective degraders are a drug class at all. Oren's recent work is on how p53 restrains stemness by controlling histone modifiers.