Obituaries 2021

IN 2021

Milton Corn (died February 7, 2021, at 93), a former dean of the Georgetown University School of Medicine (Washington, D.C.) and an internationally known expert in research directions in biomedical informatics, joined the National Library of Medicine in 1990 and later was its acting scientific director.

Manuel Datiles (died February 12, 2021, at 69) was a senior investigator, eye physician–scientist, and medical officer at the National Eye Institute. He and a NASA physicist codeveloped a clinical device based on a dynamic light-scattering technique and used it to show that oxidation-caused loss of a lens protein called alpha-crystallin leads to the formation of human age-related cataracts. The finding helped hasten the development of nonsurgical anticataract drug treatments for use in many parts of the world where cataract surgery is not available.

Roswell Eldridge (died June 3, 2021, at 87) was a neurogeneticist at the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke from the mid-1960s until his retirement in the early 1990s. He studied neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes benign tumors, and co-discovered the NF2 gene. After he retired from NIH, he trained as a general practitioner and took over a medical practice in upstate New York.

Leonard Henry “Pug” Evans (died June 24, 2021, at 77) was a mouse retrovirus expert and chief of the retroviral molecular biology section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID’s) Rocky Mountain Labs (Hamilton, Montana). At the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, he devoted his full attention to developing a therapeutic for COVID-19.

Emil J. Freireich (died February 1, 2021, at 93) worked at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) from 1955 to 1965, where he introduced the idea of treating childhood leukemia—a disease once considered to be a death sentence—with combination chemotherapy and fresh platelets that kept children from bleeding to death. In 1965, he left NIH for the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston), from which he retired in 2015.

Walter “Walt” Friauf (died October 5, 2021, at 93) was a former chief of the electrical and engineering section of the Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation Program. He co-created an electro-optical device in 1971 for the continuous measurement of blood oxygen concentrations during the use of an artificial lung.

Daniela Gerhard (died June 25, 2021, at 68), a pioneer in functional genomics research, had been the director of NCI’s Office of Cancer Genomics since 2004 after she left a faculty position at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis, Missouri).

Barbara Faye Harkins (died July 25, 2021, at 65) was the archivist in the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum (2008–2020) and was passionate about helping researchers get the information they needed and making historical documents and photos easily available to the public. She managed NIH’s large and growing oral history collection, oversaw the archiving of the websites of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, and undertook a massive overhaul of the office’s archival collection.

H. James Hoffrichter (died August 5, 2021, at 77) was a longtime senior investigator and section chief in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. His numerous innovative research contributions were in three different areas: sickle-cell hemoglobin polymerization, time-resolved spectroscopy, and protein folding. In the sickle-cell arena, he helped develop the novel double-nucleation mechanism to explain sickle hemoglobin polymerization kinetics, a mechanism that is now currently used to explain the kinetics of fibril formation in Alzheimer disease.

Linda Maxsell Huss (died April 11, 2021, at 64) retired in 2015 after a 40-year career as a public affairs specialist at the National Eye Institute.

John Inman (died on February 25, 2021, at 93), who came to NIH in 1965, was head of NIAID’s Bioorganic Chemistry Section until his retirement in 2005. His research in organic and medicinal chemistry laid the groundwork for many biomedical advances including drug development for cancer and HIV as well as methods for purifying some COVID-19 vaccines.

Miriam Kelty (died June 6, 2021, at 82), a retired psychologist and bioethics and behavioral researcher, held many leadership positions in her nearly 40 years at NIH and was the former associate director at the National Institute on Aging and founder of the NIH Bioethics Interest Group.

Bryan Kercher (died May 8, 2021, at 55) died in a climbing accident near Hamilton, Montana, where he worked as an engineering technician for NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Labs for nearly 20 years. He was also an avid photographer and was responsible for practically every NIH photo over the last decade showing the Montana setting at the Rocky Mountain Labs.

Daniel Lednicer (died January 5, 2021, at 91), a volunteer at the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum for the last 15 years, catalogued the office’s library, identified museum objects, scanned hundreds of instrument manuals and photographs, and wrote biographies of prominent NIH scientists. He was an accomplished research chemist, worked in industry before coming to the NCI in 1989, and is best known for discovering the synthesis of bromadol, an opioid analgesic selective for the mu-opioid receptor with a potency between codeine and morphine. At NCI, he was a project officer for synthetic, analytical, and drug formulation contracts in the Developmental Therapeutics Program.

Walter Thomas Lingenfelter (died March 2, 2021, at nearly 73) was born with a heart defect and not expected to live past the age of 18. In 1958, when he was 10 years old, he underwent open heart surgery at NIH and was one of the first people to be placed on a heart and lung machine.

Desmond McLearen (died August 15, 2021, at 89) was chief of the Grants Management Branch for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (approximately 1970–1985).

Mortimer Mishkin (died October 2, 2021, at 94) was one of NIH’s preeminent cognitive neuroscientists whose foundational work spanned more than six decades and elucidated the pathways through which vision, hearing, and touch connect with brain structure to encode memory. He joined the National Institute of Mental Health in 1955 and became the chief of the Laboratory of Neuropsychology in 1985 and later chief of the lab’s Section on Cognitive Neuroscience.

Churchman Louis Napper Sr. (died May 24, 2021, at 86), who retired in 1992, began his career at NIH in 1963 as a heart and lung technician. He later worked as a senior administrative duty officer at the Clinical Center before being appointed the first African American administrative officer in the National Eye Institute in 1970.

Phillip G. Nelson (died April 22, 2021, at 89) was a retired investigator and longtime scientist emeritus at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). He was chief of NICHD’s Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology until his retirement in 2004, and much of his work focused on understanding how experience shapes the development of the nervous system and how synapses function. Among his many accomplishments, he was first to show, in collaboration with Marshall Nirenberg (who won the Nobel Prize in 1968), that clonal lines of nerve and muscle were capable of establishing competent synapses.

Arthur Nienhuis (died February 3, 2021, at 79) was a past chief of the Clinical Hematology Branch in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the fourth director of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee (1993–2004). His career at NIH (1970–1993) was marked by many clinical successes in the areas of treatment of hemoglobinopathies such as sickle-cell anemia and the development of gene therapies.

George Patterson (died June 20, 2021, at 50) was a senior investigator and chief of the Section on Biophotonics in the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). His work focused on the development of probes and techniques for diffraction-limited and sub-diffraction-limited fluorescence of imaging of cells and tissues. When he was a staff scientist in the lab of Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz (NICHD), he worked with Eric Betzig in the development of the nanometer-level resolution techniques that earned Betzig a Nobel Prize in 2014. In 2009, Patterson accepted an investigator appointment at NIBIB, where he made major contributions to create both novel and improved genetically encoded fluorescent protein for use as markers and sensors.

Maxine Richardson (died October 19, 2021, at 85) was NCI’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) director from 1980 to 1996. Her office adopted an initiative created in the NHLBI EEO office to recycle medical textbooks and publications to the historically Black colleges and universities and a community college on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

John D. Termine (died June 3, 2021, at 82) spent more than 20 years as a research biochemist—focusing on diseases of bone and enamel—at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, where he was chief of the Bone Research Branch. In 1991, he became vice president and executive director at Lilly Research Laboratories, Eli Lilly and Co., and led a team in the development of a breakthrough treatment for osteoporosis.

George Vande Woude (died April 13, 2021, at 86) is known for his groundbreaking contributions to the fields of virology and oncogenes, including the 1984 discovery of the MET oncogene, which has been successfully targeted by several drugs currently used in personalized therapies. He joined NCI in 1972 as head of the Human Tumor Studies and Virus Tumor Biochemistry section and was appointed chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology in 1980. He left NIH in 1999 to become the founding research director of Van Andel Research Institute (Grand Rapids, Michigan), then returned to NCI in 2009 as distinguished scientific fellow, emeritus, retaining his role as head of the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology.

Thomas Alexander Waldmann (died September 25, 2021, at 91), who started working at NIH in 1956, was an NIH Distinguished Investigator and chief of the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch at NCI. As a renowned immunologist, his work led to many high-impact discoveries that advanced the field of organ transplantation, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. He was a leader in the study of cytokines and their receptors and of monoclonal antibodies, now a dominant form of cancer immunotherapy.

Samuel H. Wilson Jr. (died on April 23, 2021, at 82), a protein biochemist, did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the National Heart Institute, then moved to NCI in 1970, where he worked for 22 years. In 1992, the University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston, Texas) recruited him to establish the Sealy Center for Molecular Science. In 1996, he returned to NIH as deputy director and then acting director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, where he maintained an active lab for the rest of his life. His lab made many scientific contributions toward the understanding of mechanisms of faithful replication and repair of DNA and how abnormalities in the genome are corrected by a process named base excision repair.