Mark P. Pasek ’70

Mark P. Pasek ’70, of Houston; Feb. 15, from heart disease. He completed his master’s in biochemistry at the University of Chicago in 1973 and his PhD in biochemistry in 1975. Between 1975 to 1979, he was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard before being hired by Biogen, SA in 1979. For the next two years, he worked in Biogen SA’s recombinant DNA laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. By 1981, U.S. regulators allowed Biogen to do its research in the United States and he returned to Cambridge, Mass., where he helped open Biogen, Inc.’s new Cambridge lab and became Biogen’s senior scientist until 1991. His lab was awarded the Presidential Medal of Science and Technology in 1998 by President Clinton “for the development of hepatitis B vaccines, the first vaccines using recombinant DNA technology.” He was awarded four patents and he authored several publications. He is survived by a daughter, a son, his mother, and brother David ’76.