He was born
Herskó Ferenc in
Karcag,
Hungary, into a
Jewish family, the son of Shoshana/Margit 'Manci' (née Wulc) and Moshe Hershko, both teachers. During the
Second World War, his father was forced into
labor service in the Hungarian army and then taken as a prisoner by the
Soviet Army. For years, Avram's family didn't know anything about what had happened to his father. Avram, his mother and older brother Chaim/Laszlo 'Laci' were put in a
ghetto in
Szolnok. During the final days of the ghetto, most Jews were sent to be murdered in
Auschwitz, but Avram and his family managed to board trains that took them to a
concentration camp in
Austria, where they were forced into labor until the end of the war. Avram and his mother and brother survived the war and returned to their home. His father returned as well, 4 years after they had last seen him. Hershko and his family emigrated to Israel in 1950 and settled in
Jerusalem. He received his MD in 1965 and his PhD in 1969 from the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem-
Hadassah Medical Center. He was a
postdoctoral scholar at the
University of California, San Francisco. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the
Technion in
Haifa and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor at the
New York University Grossman School of Medicine. Along with
Aaron Ciechanover and
Irwin Rose, he was awarded the 2004
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of
ubiquitin-mediated
protein degradation. The ubiquitin-
proteasome system has a critical role in maintaining the homeostasis of cells and is believed to be involved in the development and progression of diseases such as cancer, muscular and neurological diseases, and immune and inflammatory responses. His contributions to science directly helped cure one of his long-time friends of cancer. ==Honours and awards==