H. Franklin Bunn

Howard Franklin Bunn

Frank Bunn has been a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School since 1979. From 1976 to 1982 he was Director of the Hematology Division at Brigham and Women's Hospital. From 1977 to 1989 he was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. For nearly 50 years Bunn played a major role in training medical students at Harvard Medical School, and residents and fellows at Brigham and Women's Hospital. From 1991 until 1998, he directed the Harvard-Markey Program in Biomedical Sciences, which provides graduate students an added year of training in human biology and disease pathophysiology.

The first 20 years of Bunn's research focused on hemoglobin.^[3] His major work included

• demonstrating that free hemoglobin in the circulating plasma is excreted by the kidney, owing to the dissociation of the a2b2 tetramer into ab dimers,
• discovery of the hemoglobin binding site of the physiologically important modifier 2,3 bisphosphoglycerate,
• demonstrating that surface charge determines the proportion of commonly encountered mutant hemoglobins in heterozygotes,
• discovery of the first example of a hemoglobin frame shift mutation,
• establishing sequence dependent rules for cleavage of the initiator methionine and N-acetylation,
• demonstrating with Gallop that the minor
  HbA1c
  contains glucose attached to the N-terminus of the beta globin chain by a ketosamine linkage,
• providing the rationale for measurement of
  HbA1c
  as an index of long-term control in diabetics, with later work indicating that this glucose-dependent modification likely contributes to long-term complications of diabetes.

The second 20 years of Bunn's research focused on identification of domains on erythropoietin (EPO) that bind to its receptor, and on characterizing the oxygen-dependent degradation domain of the HIFa transcription factor responsible for hypoxic induction of EPO and other physiologically relevant proteins.

Awards

• 1997: "Letter in Life" Award from the Pingry School, 1997
• 1999: Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2000: Stratton Medal from the American Society of Hematology
• 2009: Distinguished Graduate Alumni Scholar Award from the
  University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine^[4]
• 2009: Wallace H. Coulter Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Hematology^[5]
• 2013: First recipient of Special Faculty Prize from Harvard Medical School for Sustained Excellence in Teaching

Personal

Bunn has been married to Elizabeth Godard for over 50 years. They have three sons, George, Emory, and Andrew, and five grandsons.

References