Falkow was born into a Yiddish-speaking household in Albany, New York. His father was a shoe salesman and had immigrated from Soviet Kiev, Ukraine. His mother came from a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland. She "rented several of their bedrooms and later opened a corset shop". Falkow attributed his early interest in microbiology to reading Microbe Hunters in 1943, when he was 11 years old, which he found at the public library after the family had moved to Newport, Rhode Island. The book is a dramatization of microbiological research written by American microbiologist Paul de Kruif. Because of poor grades until his senior year of high school, an adviser suggested military rather than college.
Career
Falkow enrolled in biology at the University of Maine, because of their microbiology department. During the summers he worked in pathology at the hospital in Newport, staining slides and assisting in autopsies. He graduated in 1955. Before he even started graduate school at University of Michigan, he developed acute anxiety. He avoided movie theaters between 1956 and 1961 and dropped out of University, because of recurring panic attacks. He switched to Brown University and graduated with a PhD in 1961. He became a staff member at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the Department of Bacterial Immunology, where he was eventually named the assistant chief of the department. His early work in the 1960s focused on the genetic mechanisms, which enable bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. He showed that organisms, such as shigella, can possess gene fragments called plasmids which exist apart from the bacterial chromosome, and that they carry specialized information for survival. Under selective pressure from antibiotics, one species of bacteria can pass its plasmids to another directly without mating, thereby preserving its own specialized survival genes. In 1966, he joined Georgetown University School of Medicine as a professor of microbiology. He later moved to Seattle to join the faculty of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Here he described how meningitis and gonorrhea organisms acquire plasmids to become resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics. In the 1970s, Falkow shifted his focus to the infection process. During this period, he showed that a life-threatening diarrhea prevalent in many developing countries is caused by a sub-type of E. coli. He also co-authored a proposal for uniform nomenclature for bacterial plasmids. In 1981, he was named chairman of the Department of Medical Microbiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, a position he held until 1985. While at Stanford, Falkow encouraged Esther Lederberg to continue directing the Stanford Plasmid Reference Center, an internationally used registry for plasmids, transposons and insertion sequences.)
Stanley Falkow was married to Rhoda Ostroff with whom he had two daughters. They divorced. In 1983, he married Lucy Tompkins, a former graduate student and infectious diseases specialist at Stanford. In 2004 he was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome and given a prognosis of two years. He died on May 5, 2018 at the age of 84 at his home in Portola Valley, California of myelodysplastic syndrome.
