Emanuel Margoliash (February 10, 1920 – April 10, 2008) was a biochemist who spent much of his career studying the protein cytochrome c. He is best known for his work on molecular evolution; with Walter Fitch, he devised the Fitch-Margoliash method for constructing evolutionary trees based on protein sequences.
He served as an Israeli Army medical officer during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and subsequently held research positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem-Hadassah Medical School, the Nobel Institute Department of Biochemistry, the University of Utah College of Medicine, the McGill-Montreal General Hospital Research Institute, Abbott Laboratories, Northwestern University, where he was chair of the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology during the 1980s.
[2] He quietly enjoyed his retirement ceremonies and immediately obtained a position (with all new labs) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
This fish which lives at great ocean depths was washed up on the shores of the Comoros[4] during the war, and de Gaulle deemed it a "French fish" and refused to allow its exportation.
Margoliash went to France and with his colleagues carried out the cytochrome C isolation of the large fish, and returned with a small crystal in a small vial which represented the entire amount of cytochrome C in the unusual animal.