Obituary

As originally printed in The Physiologist, 
February 2001, Volume 44, Number 1 
Page 53

Donald J. Reis

     Donald Jeffrey Reis, Professor of Neurology at Cornell University Weil Medical College, died after a long illness on November 1, 2000. With his passing, the American Physiological Society lost a longstanding member and friend. For nearly forty years Don enriched our scientific environment with stimulating ideas and challenged us at meetings with insightful questions. Through his Laboratory of Neurobiology at Cornell he provided the rich milieu through which many young and aspiring academic scientists would pass. But just being in Don’s company made for a rich milieu. His will truly be a lasting legacy. He left behind a devoted wife Cornelia and family as well as an extended family consisting of a world of friends. He had many facets, too many for this tribute to do justice in this space. I will touch but briefly on a few and mention only a few of the many individuals whose work with Don contributed to his impact. To the innumerable contributors whose names I don’t mention I apologize, but one and all you are honored in this tribute to Don.
Musician and Entertainer: Before he did any of the things for which most will remember him, Don was a musician, a gifted pianist. I had heard Don play many times and recognized his talent, but I did not realize until the memorial service held in his honor on November 17, 2000, that he had composed music for the piano. One of his compositions, played at the service, made it clear that this young composer could bring his great sense of expression to music much as he did in his contacts with friends. I also learned that Don’s ability to regale audiences with his humorous tales was a lifelong trait. He was apparently known as a great entertainer, musical improvisator, and stage presence while an undergraduate student at Cornell. His band of like-minded students was a group from which student housing may not, even now, have recovered. He never strayed all that far from his music and even brought a piano, discarded on a New York City street, into the lab for our (and his) occasional entertainment. Music certainly provided a soothing influence there. As we in that lab enjoyed the company of some fifty scientists who worked so closely together, Don used to tell me that the best training for his job as lab director might have been under the impresario of the Metropolitan Opera: something to do with prima donnas. Despite his love for music Don felt that he could make a greater impact on the world through his science. As I was to find, he was almost always right. Clearly the loss to music was a gain to science. Fortunately he never lost his ability to entertain so that a scientific presentation by Reis was a joy even to those who didn’t understand all the subject matter.
    Physician: Don and I first met in 1974 during my first year in the Cornell Neurology resident training program and his eleventh year there. We met because the professional Don was first a neurologist. He attended in the care of patients at New York Hospital at that time and brought to attending rounds at the bedside something rather remarkable. It became immediately clear that his own neurological training under the influence of Denny Brown and Harold Wolf had created a neurologist with great clinical gifts. His diagnostic skills and his movements toward therapeutic judgment were done with such facility that we young trainees were often left scratching our heads how this lab doctor could be so quick. It also soon became clear that he applied the scientific method in clinical diagnosis. That he could so effectively merge his scientific discipline and clinical skills was one of the great lessons learned on rounds with him. He remains a role model as we seek to encourage more young physicians to enter the field of science and contribute in their own way to scientific discovery.
    Teacher and Mentor: Role models have a tendency to teach by example and Don was no exception. It was during his teaching rounds that I first saw how he observed at the bedside, analyzed what was not known about the biology of a patient’s condition, and began to develop hypotheses that could then be taken to the lab. One particular rounds stands out because it stimulated my entering a field that had been foreign to me before I met Don. On that occasion, while discussing a patient with orthostatic hypotension, Don gave us a summary of then current knowledge of cardiovascular reflex control. As he proceeded, his enthusiasm for the topic became contagious and the map he drew of central reflex circuitry came alive. A year later as I sought his counsel about my desire to enter a scientific career, that discussion was still fresh in my mind. His way of helping me find my way into a lab was not by giving directions but instead by allowing me to find my own direction. When he asked what was the thing that had heightened my enthusiasm the most during my medical training, I immediately related how those significant rounds had excited me. He not only offered to have me join his lab, but he also saw to it that I would work with just the right people to provide for my growth. Of course, my experience was not unique. It replayed itself time and again with others who entered the Laboratory of Neurobiology and led many to think of Don as their scientific father, a title that particularly made him cringe.
    Ever Inquisitive Scientist: Even as a medical student at Cornell Medical College, Don began to bloom as a productive scientist who took advantage of every opportunity to broaden the scope of his investigation. One of his first publications dealt with a cutaneous reflex, the palmomental reflex, often tested by neurologists at the time. But his paper went beyond a simple description of the reflex and established the sites in the brain from which the reflex arose. In honing his skills he worked at UCLA with Magoun, at the NIH with MacLean and Axelrod, at the Karolinska Institute with Kugelberg and Granit, at Chiba University with Homma, and at the National Hospital at Queens Square with Blackwood. In 1963 he returned to Cornell to join the Department of Neurology being molded by Fred Plum. There, with Plum and Posner, he participated in developing a neurological program whose emphasis was not the descriptive neurology of the past but a dynamic neurology with great emphasis, from bedside to bench, on normal physiology and pathophysiology. His reputation as a scientist in that program quickly passed from intramural to extramural to international and he began the influence that has meant so much to students of central autonomic control and cardiovascular physiology. His work with Nobutaka Doba and Wayne Crill put the nucleus tractus solitarii (NTS) on the cardiovascular physiologists’ map and his later work with Chris Ross and David Ruggiero established the importance of the rostral ventrolateral medulla in sympathetic control. The NTS work made the possibility of “neurogenic hypertension” a reality as did his subsequent work with Miura, Hoff, Dampney, Kumada, and Doba in describing central mechanisms of the Cushing Response and regions of the brain stem where application of slight pressure or hypoxia led to increased blood pressure. With Snyder and Nathan he described disturbances in blood pressure regulation with central lesions but also contributed to our understanding of the integration of cardiovascular control with behavior, a theme that he addressed repeatedly with Joseph LeDoux. His efforts to understand the pharmacology of central reflex control led to contributions on transmitters in all of the systems he studied. As was typical of most of his studies, he used multidisciplinary approaches to address each question. Often his contribution to the finished product surpassed the scientific and led to new terms such as “suicide transport” that he coined with Wiley in their first work describing cellular effects of toxic lectins. New avenues of study began to emerge through collaborations with Virginia Pickel in immunohistochemistry and Tong Joh in neurochemistry. With them, the integration theme could be taken to the cellular level, but it would appear in further systemic studies like those performed by Blessing and Sved, who, while working in Don’s lab, demonstrated integration of neuroendocrine and sympathetic control through the caudal ventrolateral medulla and began studies that would lead to our current understanding of the baroreflex arc. 
    As can be seen with a look at the composite of his studies, Don’s approach was not to study mechanisms of isolated phenomena. The body of his work sheds light on his belief that the brain has the capacity to regulate not only peripheral circulation but also its own blood flow. Considering the diving reflex, Don hypothesized that the brain could also provide some protection for itself from damaging effects of ischemia and he began to seek a putative central oxygen sensor. From those hypotheses grew his work with Doba, Nakai, Iadecola, and Golanov who showed the influence of the fastigial nucleus of the cerebellum on peripheral and central circulation and the influence of central neurons on brain damage following ischemia. It was toward these latter studies that Don was working at the time of his death.
    The impact that Don Reis had on the field of cardiovascular physiology is indeed profound and widely acknowledged amongst APS. Therefore, with a desire to develop a perpetual memorial to Don, the APS has announced a campaign to develop a fund that will endow a lectureship and award program to be presented annually at the Experimental Biology meeting.

Bill Talman

[Table of Contents] [Personal Reflections] [APS News] [Membership] [Education] [ACDP News] [Experimental Biology] [Public Affairs] [Positions Available] [Book Reviews] [Books Received] [Obituary: Donald J. Reis] [People & Places] [Scientific Meetings and Congresses] [APS Membership Application]