Dr. Jesse Roth ’55, Endocrinologist Who Advanced Understanding of Diabetes

Dr. Jesse Roth ’55, an endocrinologist who helped transform the understanding of diabetes through his pioneering work on insulin receptors — proteins on the surface of cells — died on March 11, 2026, at his home in Hurley, N.Y. He was 91.

In 1971, Roth and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health provided the first direct evidence that cells carry a specific receptor for insulin, the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels, and ultimately showed that diabetes can occur when those receptors are faulty or too few in number. Whereas previously Type 2 diabetes was thought to stem from a person having too little insulin, the paradigm-shifting research shifted the onus to the receptors; it also established that a receptor and its hormone — in this case, insulin — operate in tandem.

The discovery was initially controversial. “I remember presenting some of the receptor work at several excellent academic centers and the audience just looking at me, wondering why I would be doing this,” Roth said in an interview in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) in 2020. In time, however, it not only revolutionized the study of diabetes, but also paved the way to understanding that many human disorders could be linked to receptor malfunction.

Roth was born on August 5, 1934, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the second of three children to Paul and Rebecca (neé Milberg) Roth. His father co-owned a clothing company in Manhattan’s garment district; his mother managed the home. “At the time I was growing up, science was just the hottest thing,” he told JCI. “We did those silly experiments, adding vinegar to bicarbonate soda and detonating small explosions.” He credited that fascination, along with the influence of family members who were physicians, with his interest in science.

At the College, Roth majored in art history. He earned his M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, graduating in 1959 as a member of its inaugural class, and did his medical residency at Barnes Hospital (now Barnes-Jewish Hospital) in St. Louis. Roth envisioned a future as either a clinician or a researcher, but cemented his commitment to the latter through his experience as an American Diabetes Association research fellow at a Veterans Administration hospital in the Bronx. His studies under Dr. Solomon Berson, a physician, and future Nobel Prize-winner Rosalyn Yalow, a medical physicist, laid the groundwork for his later discoveries.

Roth spent nearly 30 years at the NIH in Bethesda, Md., arriving in July 1963 and rising to become scientific director of its National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. He also was assistant surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service from 1985 to 1991. He then transitioned to Johns Hopkins as a professor and director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology and head of the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging, where he studied endocrine disorders that relate to aging. In 2000 Roth joined the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y., where he continued studying hormones and their receptors across multiple conditions, including obesity.

“Jesse was a larger-than-life personality, always exuberant, spewing ideas a mile a minute,” Dr. Robert Lefkowitz ’62, VPS’66, a postdoctoral fellow in Roth’s lab in the late 1960s, told The New York Times in an interview for Roth’s obituary. The Nobel Prize-winning Lefkowitz was one of many young scientists whom Roth mentored through the years. That tradition of teaching was one of the most meaningful aspects of his career, he shared in a 2011 interview for The Endocrine Society Oral History Collection. “To reach a point where “you’re learning more from them than you taught them, and pretty soon they are better than you are … You’re just proud and thrilled,” he said.

Roth received the Banting Medal and the Eli Lilly Award from the American Diabetes Association; and the Koch Award, Robert H. Williams Distinguished Leadership Award and Ernst Oppenheimer Award from The Endocrine Society. His accomplishments as both mentor and teacher were specifically recognized with the American Diabetes Association’s Albert Renold Award.

Roth is survived by his wife, Susan Laufer, and their daughter, Alisa, along with another daughter, Alana; son, Alex; brother, Joshua; and three grandchildren.