Personal History
George Streisinger was born in Budapest, Hungary, on December 27, 1927. In 1937, his family left Budapest for New York to escape Nazi persecution. Streisinger attended New York public schools and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1944. He obtained a B.S. degree from Cornell University in 1950, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1953. He completed postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology from 1953 to 1956. He married Lotte Sielman in 1949, and they had two children, Lisa and Cory, born in 1954 and 1955. Streisinger accepted a post at the University of Oregon Institute of Molecular Biology in Eugene in 1960.
Streisinger was well known as an innovative professor in and out of the classroom, conscripting a dance class to illustrate protein synthesis, and often requested beginning and non-major biology students. He was very politically active, organizing grass-roots resistance to the Vietnam war and legislative opposition to John Kennedy's civil defense program. He testified to successfully ban mutagenic herbicides in Douglas fir reforestation, and led and won a battle to exclude secret war department research from the University of Oregon campus.
His wife, Lotte, is a noted artist and community activist, and the founder of the Eugene Saturday Market, the inspiration for the Portland Oregon Saturday Market.
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