Farewell to Professor David Yaffe – A Pillar of the Myogenesis Field

Abstract

It is with great sadness that we have learned about the passing of Professor David Yaffe (1929-2020, Israel). Yehi Zichro Baruch - May his memory be a blessing. David was a man of family, science and nature. A native of Israel, David grew up in the historic years that preceded the birth of the State of Israel. He was a member of the group that established Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev desert, and in 1948 participated in Israel’s War of Independence. David and Ruth eventually joined Kibbutz Givat Brenner by Rehovot, permitting David to be both a kibbutz member and a life-long researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where David received his PhD in 1959. David returned to the Institute after his postdoc at Stanford. Here, after several years of researching a number of tissues as models for studying the process of differentiation, David entered the myogenesis field and stayed with it to his last day. With his dedication to the field of myogenesis and his commitment to furthering the understanding of the People and the Land of Israel throughout the international scientific community, David organized the first ever myogenesis meeting that took place in Shoresh, Israel in 1975. This was followed by the 1980 myogenesis meeting at the same place and many more outstanding meetings, all of which brought together myogenesis, nature and scenery. Herein, through the preparation and publication of this current manuscript, we are meeting once again at a “David Yaffe myogenesis meeting". Some of us have been members of the Yaffe lab, some of us have known David as his national and international colleagues in the myology field. One of our contributors has also known (and communicates here) about David Yaffe’s earlier years as a kibbutznick in the Negev. Our collective reflections are a tribute to Professor David Yaffe. We are fortunate that the European Journal of Translational Myology has provided us with tremendous input and a platform for holding this 2020 distance meeting "Farwell to Professor David Yaffe - A Pillar of the Myogenesis Field".