When Bernard Roizman and his parents arrived in New York City by ship in 1947, his dream was to become a writer or a lawyer, not a virologist. It was easy to understand why he was interested in words and the rule of law. At 18, he had already experienced a life’s worth of cataclysm in Eastern Europe during World War II. But soon after his family settled in Philadelphia, where he enrolled at Temple University, he made two important discoveries that altered the course of his life.
One was Betty Cohen, a fellow student with whom he agreed to share his coat locker in exchange for discounted tickets to the Philadelphia Orchestra; she became his wife of 70 years.
The other was microbiology. The courses were required for graduation, but they captivated him and set him on a path to a career in science.
“It was my second love at first sight — that of my wife preceded it,” he wrote in a 2015 essay titled “The Maturation of a Scientist: An Autobiography.”
Over the next seven decades, including 52 years at the University of Chicago, Dr. Roizman became a leading authority on herpes simplex virus, which causes cold sores, genital infections and, in rare cases, encephalitis. He died at 96 on April 13 in Chicago. The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Arthur, his only immediate survivor.
Dr. Roizman’s studies “largely defined the field” of herpes research, Peter Palese, a professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, said in an interview. “He was really the herpes virus person par excellence.”
Herpes simplex virus, or HSV, spreads primarily via skin-to-skin contact and is considered a lifelong disease. Symptoms can be treated with antiviral medications but there is no approved vaccine or cure. An estimated 3.8 billion people worldwide under the age of 50 have HSV-1, the main cause of cold sores around the mouth, according to the World Health Organization. More than 500 million people globally between 15 and 49 have HSV-2, or genital herpes.
When Dr. Roizman began his research, the way herpes simplex virus worked inside human cells was still a mystery. He mapped the genome of the virus, identified which of its 80-plus genes are essential for replicating and determined how it hijacks the machinery of host cells, which he likened to “converting an entire department store to sell only one kind of hairpin.”
One of his most significant findings, in the 1970s, was that herpes carries distinct genetic fingerprints. This discovery helped bolster the field of molecular epidemiology, which traces how diseases spread from one person to another.
Using these techniques, Dr. Roizman demonstrated that nurses in maternity wards were unintentionally transmitting HSV from infant to infant by failing to wash their hands. The finding led to changes in newborn-care practices that significantly reduced transmission.
“On the negative side,” he said wryly in his 2015 essay, “we have inadvertently supplied the tool to prove infidelity.”
In the 1980s, Dr. Roizman developed a prototype of a vaccine using a live herpes virus that had been genetically altered to prevent infection. The vaccine showed promise in animals but was disappointing in human trials. A critical reason that the vaccine remains elusive is that it can hibernate in nerve cells, remaining dormant and largely invisible to the immune system before reactivating months or years later when triggered by illness, stress or fatigue.
In the early 1990s, Dr. Roizman’s lab identified what he called a master gene, which disables a host’s immune defenses and allows the virus to thrive.
When the gene is removed, HSV becomes too weak to damage healthy cells. The finding was foundational to a new class of cancer treatments known as oncolytic viruses — genetically engineered viruses that work as molecular Trojan horses, selectively killing cancer cells while stimulating the body’s immune response. (In 2002, the university settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought by a former postdoctoral student of Dr. Roizman’s, who said she had not been given proper credit for her role in the discovery of the gene and its potential therapeutic uses.)
Hundreds of clinical trials have been conducted with oncolytic virus therapy, and it is now used to treat advanced melanoma.
Without Dr. Roizman’s essential research, “none of today’s oncolytic HSV drugs would exist,” Fenyong Liu, a professor of infectious diseases at School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Ph.D. student of Dr. Roizman’s, wrote in an email.
Bernard Roizman was born on April 17, 1929, in Chisinau, a city that was in Romania at the time and is now the capital of Moldova. He was the only child of Jewish parents. His father, Abram Roizman, started a small knitting mill that made gloves and sweaters. His mother, Ludmille (Sheinberg) Roizman, ran the household.
During World War II, Chisinau was occupied by Soviet, then Nazi forces. The Roizmans spent much of that time as refugees in the Soviet Union, giving up everything and fleeing the front lines by foot, hay wagon and coal train, he wrote. At times the family was on the edge of starvation and lived without electricity and running water. His mother’s sister and her husband died at Auschwitz.
With the help of underground Jewish organizations at war’s end, the Roizmans moved westward, arriving in Italy late in 1945. Bernard had a facility for languages and at 16 worked as a translator at displaced persons camps. The family emigrated to the United States in 1947.
Dr. Roizman received his bachelor’s degree from Temple’s College of Science and Technology in 1952 and a master’s degree from its School of Medicine in 1954. He received a doctor of science degree from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health in 1956. While on the faculty there in 1957, he discovered, with two colleagues, the respiratory syncytial virus, which infects the lungs and respiratory tract and can severely affect infants.
He joined the University of Chicago in 1965 as an associate professor of microbiology, then became a professor of virology. He retired in 2017. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1979 and the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in 2001. He trained some 100 graduate, doctoral and postdoctoral students.
“There are very few people who have trained as many impactful scientists as he has,” said Glenn Randall, a professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago.
His wife, Betty, a legal librarian whom he married in 1950, died in 2021.
Dr. Roizman wrote in his 2015 essay that he viewed science as an opportunity to “discover the designs in the mosaics of life.”
“What initiates my search of discovery is an observation that makes no sense unless there exists a novel design,” Dr. Roizman wrote. “Once the design is revealed there is little interest in filling all the gaps.”
