Gerald Weissmann

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Gerald Weissmann
New York University School of Medicine

Gerald Weissmann (August 7, 1930 – July 10, 2019)

liposomes
and is credited with coining that term.

Early life and education

Weissmann was born in

Vienna, Austria, on August 7, 1930, to Adolf and Greta (Lustbader) Weissmann.[3][4] His family, being Jewish, fled the Nazis and immigrated to the United States in 1938, and Gerald and his family became naturalized American citizens in 1943.[5] After attending the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1950 and an M.D. from New York University (NYU) in 1954. He also pursued an early career in art, exhibiting at a major New York gallery.[6]

Career

After clinical training at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City, and active service as captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, he did a research fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry at NYU. (1958–59) under Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa. Lewis Thomas then selected him as chief medical resident at Bellevue Hospital Center (1959–60). Weissmann next worked at the Strangeways Research Laboratory, in Cambridge, England, studying cell biology under Dame Honor B. Fell until1962. He then returned to the NYU School of Medicine, joining its faculty, where he remained for the rest of his career. In 1964 and 1969, he was a visiting investigator at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England; in 1973-1974 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation scholarship at the Centre de Physiologie et d'Immunologie Cellulaires, Hôpital Saint-Antoine at Sorbonne University, Paris, as a visiting investigator; and as visiting fellow at the William Harvey Research Institute at the Queen Mary University of London, in 1987.

Weissmann became Professor of Medicine at NYU in 1970, and served as director of the Division of Rheumatology from 1973 to 1999. Starting in 1970, he spent summers as an investigator and lecturer and served for 18 years as a trustee (later emeritus) of the

He was responsible for the co-discovery of

Myocet, are in clinical use.[12][13] There are now over 940,000 references to liposomes on Google scholar [1] Liposomes have been recognized for offering "one of the most successful drug delivery systems (DDS) given their established utility and success in the clinic in the past 40-50 years."[14] Weissmann has been acknowledged as "Liposome's Literary Founder."[2]

Dr. Weissmann has received the Lila Gruber Award for Cancer Research two residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, the Alessandro Robecchi and Paul Klemperer awards for inflammation research, as well as the Distinguished Investigator and Presidential Gold Medal Awards of the American College of Rheumatology. He is a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei of Rome and the Royal Society of Medicine of London. He was a master and past president of the American College of Rheumatology, a past president of the Harvey Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The New York Academy of Medicine and The New York Academy of Sciences. With Joshua Lederberg, he was a founding member of the advisory boards of the Pew Scholars in Biomedical Sciences, the Ellison Medical Foundation, and was the founding chairman of the jury for the Prix Galien Prix Galien USA.

From 1975 to 2001,[15] Weissmann was the founding editor of the journal, Inflammation; from 1979 to 1984, he edited MD Magazine, and from 2006 to 2016 he served as editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal. At the time of his death, he was the book review editor of that journal.

Essays

A member of PEN, Weissmann has published essays and reviews of cultural history in The New Republic, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. His work has been collected in eleven volumes, among them The Woods Hole Cantata (1985) and The Fevers of Reason (2018). Recently, he has edited a special issue of The European Review < Volume 27 / Issue 1, February 2019> that revisits C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" after 60 years. His work was praised for scientific insight by Jonas Salk, for literary style by Kurt Vonnegut, and for breadth of general culture by Adam Gopnik. His published volumes of essays include:

  • The Woods Hole Cantata (1985)
  • They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus (1987)
  • The Doctor With Two Heads (1990)
  • The Doctor Dilemma (1992)
  • Democracy and DNA (1995)
  • Darwin's Audubon (2002)
  • The Year of the Genome (2002)
  • Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment (2007)
  • Mortal and Immortal DNA (2009)
  • Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter (2012)
  • The Fevers of Reason (2018)

Personal life

He married Ann Weissmann (nee Raphael) in 1953, and together they had two children: Lisa Beth Weissmann, MD, of Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge, MA and Andrew Weissmann, distinguished senior fellow at the N.Y.U. School of Law.

Death

He died on July 10, 2019.

References

  1. ^ "FASEB Mourns Passing of Gerald Weissmann". FASEB (Press release). 2019-07-12. Retrieved 2019-07-14.
  2. .
  3. ^ HighBeam
  4. ^ "Paid Notice: Deaths LEDER, GRETA (NEE LUSTBADER)". The New York Times. 3 February 1998.
  5. ^ Weissmann, Gerald (2 August 2007). Written at The Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. "Gerald Weissmann, Oral History Transcript #0371" (Interview). Interviewed by Arthur Daemmrich. Philadelphia, PA: Chemical Heritage Foundation.
  6. ^ "Youthful Painter Gives Exhibition" New York Times December 17, 1949, p. 15.
  7. ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: Gerald Weissmann, July 15, 2013. YouTube.
  8. ^ Goldstein, I.M., Roos, D., Kaplan, H., and Weissmann, G., Complement and immunoglobulins stimulate superoxide production by human leukocytes independently of phagocytosis, Journal of Clinical Investigation., 56:1155-1163, 1975.
  9. ^ Rosenstein ED, Greenwald RA, Kushner LJ, Weissmann G. Hypothesis: the humoral immune response to oral bacteria provides a stimulus for the development of rheumatoid arthritis. Inflammation. 28:311-318 2004.
  10. ^ Abramson, S.B., Belmont, H.M., Hopkins, P., Buyon, J., Winchester, R. and Weissmann, G. Complement activation and vascular injury in systemic lupus erythematosus. Journal of Rheumatology. 14:43-46, 1987.
  11. ^ Kimmel, S.C., Cronstein, B.N., Levin, R.I., and Weissmann, G. A mechanism for the antiinflammatory effects of corticosteroids: The glucocorticoid receptor regulates leukocyte adhesion to endothelial cells and expression of ELAM-1 and ICAM-1. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – U.S.A., 89:9991-9995, 1992.
  12. ^ Bangham, A.D., Standish, M.M. and Weissmann, G., The action of steroids and streptolysin S on the permeability of phospholipid structures to cations, Journal of Molecular Biology, 13:253-259, 1965.
  13. ^ Sessa, G. and Weissmann, G., Phospholipid spherules (liposomes) as a model for biological membranes, Journal of Lipid Research, 9:310-318, 1968.
  14. ^ : Leung, A W. Y.; Amador, C; Wang, Lin Chuan; et al. Pharmaceutics, 11:124-125, March 2019
  15. .