Michel Revel has M.D. and Ph.D. degrees obtained in 1963 from the University of Strasbourg, France, the city in which he was born in 1938. After a post-doctorate at Harvard Medical School in Boston, he hold research positions at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique in Paris working with Prof Francois Gros, a director of the Pasteur Institute. In 1968, he was appointed at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, where he has been a full Professor since 1973, heading for several periods the Departments of Virology and of Molecular Genetics.