Stanley J. Korsmeyer, MD, Renowned Cancer Biologist, Passes Away at Age 54.

(From AScribe)

BOSTON -- Stanley J. Korsmeyer, MD, a scientific leader at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute whose landmark discoveries about why cancer cells survive opened a promising new avenue for cancer treatment, died March 31. A non-smoker, he died of lung cancer at 54.

Throughout a stellar career, Dr. Korsmeyer was much-honored and regarded affectionately by colleagues and junior scientists throughout the cancer research community. He was a powerful and focused scientific visionary with an iron core of determination, tempered by a sunny, upbeat disposition. As a mentor, he guided the early careers of many postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and technicians. Nick Powley, a former student in the Korsmeyer Lab, summarized the mentoring he enjoyed there with these observations: "He led with succinct and respectful questions that helped others to arrive at their own solutions with a sense of accomplishment only attainable through discovery and personal achievement. He was the best role model."

"Stan Korsmeyer was one of the world's great scientists and one of its greatest people," said Edward J. Benz Jr., MD, Dana-Farber's president. "He was admired and loved for who he was even more than for what he accomplished. Even in the face of his illness, he was determined to take care of and support his family and those who depended on him in his lab. We will all miss him profoundly."

Dr. Korsmeyer burst on the scientific scene in the late 1980s, demonstrating that a particular form of blood cancer arose because a genetic flaw allowed the cells to survive the body's normal process for getting rid of them -- "programmed" cell death, or apoptosis. The abnormal gene that blocked apoptosis, Bcl-2, thus became the first of a new class of cancer-causing "oncogenes" and Dr. Korsmeyer was credited with spearheading the study of apoptosis in cancer causation. "The recognition of apoptosis' primary role in cancer was a major insight that profoundly affected how we thought about cell death and survival," said Douglas Green, of the University of California in San Diego, a leading scientist in the field.

For his trailblazing research, Dr. Korsmeyer was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received many noteworthy honors, including the Bristol-Meyers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research, the General Motors Mott Award, the first annual Wiley Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science, the Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award, and the Harvard Mentoring Award. For 19 years Dr. Korsmeyer was a well-known investigator for the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the largest private funder of biomedical research and science education in the nation. HHMI supports about 300 highly selected scientists at their home institutions.

"He was everybody's hero -- as a scientist and as a human being," said eminent scientist and close friend, Nobel laureate Robert Horvitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "His contributions were truly major and pioneering, and they revolutionized the field," Horvitz added.