Arthur Furst ’37, M.S. ’40

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Arthur Furst, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of San Francisco, understands better than most what opportunities and encouragement can mean to a young person. Orphaned at the age of four, he was reared in orphanages and by relatives until he entered college in the early 1930s.

The educational foundation Arthur received at UCLA prepared him for an illustrious academic career. His early investigations in the 1940s laid the groundwork for the theory of biological antagonism. In 1952 he was the first person to show that cancer chemotherapeutic agents could be administered orally, and in 1957 he demonstrated that cancer cells could become resistant to these agents, an observation that transformed the ways physicians administer cancer drugs. The director of the Institute of Chemical Biology at USF, which he founded in 1961, Arthur has been conducting pioneering research into the roles of metals in carcinogenesis and cancer therapy since the late 1960s. Although he retired in 1981, he remains active in the laboratory and serves as a full-time consultant in toxicology. He has also authored more than 225 articles and a book, The Chemistry of Chelation in Cancer.

Throughout his career, Arthur’s contributions have been recognized in numerous ways. In 1991, however, Arthur decided to establish an honor of his own. In a rare act of vision and generosity, he endowed an award to be presented annually to an outstanding undergraduate in the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, at once completing and perpetuating the circle of achievement that began when he first set foot on a fledgling university campus in Westwood.