London was the first professor to hold dual roles at Harvard and MIT, and was the founding director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. He received numerous awards for his groundbreaking work deciphering the molecular regulation of hemoglobin synthesis at the level of transcription and translation. He and his colleagues demonstrated that hemoglobin is the endogenous source of the yellowish pigment bilirubin, which provided key insights into jaundice and heme oxygenase research.

Photo credit: courtesy of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science