Eugene and Ruth Roberts

The Eugene and Ruth Roberts Summer Student Academy has been an integral part of City of Hope for 65 years. The first two students enrolled in 1960. Today, more than 2,000 students have participated. The program was established by City of Hope’s director emeritus of neurobiochemistry and member of the National Academy of Sciences; Eugene Roberts, Ph.D., who passed away in November 2016, following a career with City of Hope spanned more than six decades.
 
Program Leadership
 
Following Dr. Roberts' decision to step down freom directing the Academy, we have been very fortunate to have wonderful leasers guide the program. From 1977-2016 the Program Director was Paul Salvaterra, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Neurosciences. In 2017, David Ann, Ph.D., Associate Chair/Professor in the Department of Diabetes Complications and Metabolism and currently the Dean of the Irell & Manella Graduate School, became the Program Director.
 
Dr. Eugene Roberts' Career Path
 
Upon completion of his doctoral work at the University of Michigan in 1943, Roberts was recruited as the assistant head of the Manhattan Project’s inhalation section at the University of Rochester. The Manhattan Project was tasked with developing technology which resulted in the creation of the atomic bomb.  The group to which Dr. Roberts belonged set the legal safety limits for human exposure to uranium dust resulting from the enrichment of 235U used in the development of the atomic bomb.
 

Following the end of the war, Dr. Roberts   joined the Division of Cancer Research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. There he organized a group to study nitrogen metabolism in normal and neoplastic tissues. The major conclusion of the studies was the generalization that "no matter how or from which tissue tumors arise, they more nearly resemble each other biochemically than do normal tissues or than normal tissues resemble each other.” The importance of amino acid glutamine stood out.

 
In 1949 Dr. Roberts’ research also led to the discovery of the presence of large amounts of GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid) in the brain and spinal cord. He subsequently demonstrated that GABA played a key role as a major inhibitory neurotransmitter.
 

In 1954, Dr. Roberts joined City of Hope to organize a research program. As a summer investigator for six years at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Maine, he was inspired by the summer student program that provided talented high school students with research opportunities. Among them were Howard Temin and David Baltimore, both of whom became Nobel Laureates. That program became a model for City of Hope's Summer Student Academy which he established in 1960.


During his time at City of Hope, Dr. Roberts’ research focused on identifying major inhibitory command-control mechanisms at the levels of membranes, the genome, the brain, and society.  


In 1988 Dr. Roberts was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences reflecting on the seminal contribution that he made to neurosciences.


Throughout much of his career Dr. Roberts was supported by his wife, Ruth Roberts, who performed laboratory research and administrative tasks and managed the summer academy for many years. Ruth Roberts passed away in July 2023. Together, the couple embodied the ethos that scientific research is not a job but a passion and a way of life.