Maurice Sanford Fox (October 11, 1924 – January 26, 2020) was an American geneticist and molecular biologist, and professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he served as department chair between 1985 and 1989.

[2] Maurice Fox (Maury) was born of poor Russian Jewish immigrants and spent his formative years living in New York City.

His study of chemistry began at Stuyvesant High School and, after a brief stint at Queens College where he took calculus from Banesh Hoffmann,[3] and another as weather forecaster in the U.S. Army Air Force during WWII, culminated in a Ph.D. under Willard Libby at the University of Chicago in 1951.

It was a heady time, in which bright young people, coming from a range of scientific disciplines, were challenged to pose questions about biology on which their diverse skills might be brought to bear.

Directly or indirectly, it led, e.g., to the search for RNA viruses by Tim Loeb (1961), to the discovery of the SOS response in bacteria by Miroslav Radman (1976), and to the development of techniques of bacterial cell fusion by Pierre Shaeffer (1976).