Professor Herschman is a leading figure on fundamental questions of cell growth and division and its relationship to the development of tumors. When he came to UCLA in 1969, he became a leading proponent of the then new technique of cell culture to study these questions.

His early studies of the effects of growth factors on cultured cells evolved into a gene discovery program, focusing on genes that show a rapid response to a growth stimulus provided by, for example, a tumor promoter. Among the "early response" genes that he discovered was a novel prostaglandin cyclooxygenase gene, subsequently adopted by the pharmaceutical industry for development of a major drug.

Most recently Dr. Herschman set out to develop a technique that would permit non-invasive and repetitive tracking of genes introduced into animals (and eventually into people, in the course of somatic gene therapy). In close collaboration with the distinguished positron emission tomography (PET) group at UCLA, he succeeded in devising such a gene imaging technology. Thus his basic studies of biochemistry, molecular and cell biology have expanded into areas of pharmacology and molecular medicine.