He studied medicine at the American University in Beirut, graduating in 1935.
Three years later he came to the United States and trained in pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, then held a faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 1949 to 1957.
For the next ten years he was professor and chairman of the department of microbiology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
[2] In 1968 he became professor of molecular biology at the Massachusetts Division of the American Cancer Society, and chief of the division of protein chemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts.
He was American Cancer Society Research Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology at Tufts University School of Medicine from 1978 to 1984.