Jan Breslow

[1][3] In 1973, he took up a post as head of the metabolism division of Boston Children's Hospital, as well as successively instructor, assistant and associate professor in pediatric medicine at Harvard Medical School.

[4] He started to work on the genetics of cholesterol handling in the late 1970s,[5] and in the early 1980s, with Vassilis Zannis, he was one of the earliest to dissect the different variants of human apolipoprotein E (ApoE), a component of very low-density lipoprotein.

[4] In 1992, his group found that deleting the mouse gene for ApoE caused the animals to develop elevated blood cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis within around 6 months, on a normal diet.

[7] Nobuyo Maeda's group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also independently created ApoE knockouts (apoe−/−) that developed atherosclerosis at the same time.

[14] Breslow is an elected fellow of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (1984),[2] US National Academy of Sciences (1995), Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (1996)[15] and the Institute of Medicine (1997).