Obituaries

As originally published in The Physiologist
Volume 45, Number 2, April 2002, page 124

Robert W. Berliner

Clifford "Ladd" Prosser

Robert W. Berliner (1915-2002)

    Robert W. Berliner, former Dean of Yale University School of Medicine, Professor Emeritus of Cellular and Molecular Physiology and Professor Emeritus of Internal Medicine, and the APS President from 1967-1968, passed away on February 5 at the age of 86 of pulmonary complications after a severe episode of the flu. Robert remained active to the very end and had visited Washington, DC the day before he entered Yale-New Haven Hospital.
    Born in New York City in 1915, Robert received his BS degree from Yale in 1936. He left Yale in his junior year to begin his medical education at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and received his MD degree in 1939. After completing his internship at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, he held positions at Goldwater Memorial Hospital and New York University School of Medicine. It was at these institutions that he collaborated with James A. Shannon who subsequently was appointed Director of Research at the National Heart Institute. Robert was one of the first investigators recruited by Shannon to join him at the NIH in 1950, at which time Robert was named Chief, Laboratory of Kidney and Electrolyte Metabolism at the National Heart Institute. He remained at NIH successively as Director of Intramural Research at the National Heart Institute and as Deputy Director for Science for the entire NIH facility.
    Robert’s earliest research was as a medical student in the laboratory of Robert F. Loeb. This period kindled an interest in problems of fluid and electrolyte metabolism that formed a thread through much of his subsequent work. His initial work with James Shannon was in the study of excretion of electrolytes. While he was working in Shannon’s laboratory, the US became involved in World War II, and Shannon then diverted the efforts of the research group to the study of malaria. During the next four years, this team was responsible for developing methods for the quantitative evaluation of new drugs for the treatment of malaria and became the main center for such evaluation. After the war, Robert returned to the investigation of renal function. During the next several years, Berliner and his associates carried out studies of the acidification of the urine and the regulation of acid-base balance. Studies in his laboratory helped establish early concepts of how potassium, sodium, hydrogen and water are transported by the kidney. 
    Robert Berliner served as president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Physiological Society and the American Society of Nephrology. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians. He was a recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the Department of HEW, the Homer Smith Award in Renal Physiology and the George M. Kober Medal from the Association of American Physicians. In 1973 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Science by his alma mater, Yale University. His citation for the honorary Doctor of Science Degree read: “You have developed your own high technology (ingenious instrumentation), on the smallest scale, for observing the transport of chemical substances across the membranes of living cells. Thus, you have created elegant models, of great precision, which permit us to understand the mechanisms in kidney disease. For this outstanding contribution, and in appreciation of your role as the nation’s leading statesman in biomedical science, Yale takes pride in conferring upon you the degree of Doctor of Science.”
    Robert became Dean of the Yale University School of Medicine in July 1973 and served with distinction for eleven years. Under his leadership, the School became one of the top two or three institutions in America in terms of hosting research supported by peer-reviewed grants. He oversaw the creation of outstanding teaching facilities in the Hope Building, the renewal of in-patient teaching facilities at Yale-New Haven Hospital, the development of the Faculty Practice Plan and the establishment of the first major fund-raising campaign in the history of the School of Medicine.
His trainees and students have gone on to lead some of the major nephrology and medical departments nationwide. These include Barry Brenner, John Dirks, Rex Jamison, Jared Grantham, Maurice Burg, Joseph Hoffman, Fred Wright, Joseph Handler, Norman Levinsky and Eugene Braunwald. His mentorship and his humility were trademarks of his character. He is survived by his wife, Lee, two daughters, Nancy (a Yale medical graduate and professor) and Alice and two sons, Robert W. Jr. and Henry John. 

Clifford Ladd Prosser (1907-2002)

    Clifford Ladd Prosser, Professor Emeritus of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign, and the APS President from 1967-1968, passed away on Sunday, February 3, 2002, shortly before his 95th birthday. Known as “Ladd” to his friends and colleagues, he was the embodiment of a true scientist, devoting nearly seven decades to the pursuit of comparative animal physiology. He received a zoology degree from the University of Rochester in 1929. Enthusiastic to study experimental biology, he attended Johns Hopkins University, receiving a PhD in Biology (1932). Part of his doctoral studies, carried out under S.O. Mast, involved motor behavior of amoebae. This and his independent studies on the earthworm nervous system laid the foundation for his work in comparative animal physiology. A Parker Fellowship enabled him to carry out postdoctoral research at Harvard (1933) and England (1934). At Harvard, he worked with the auditory neurophysiologist Hallowell Davis where he sharpened his skills in electrophysiology and discovered the caudal photoreceptor of crayfish. He also associated with such founding figures of American physiology as Walter Cannon and Alexander Forbes. In 1934 he studied at Cambridge and Oxford with Edgar Adrian and John Eccles.
    Ladd’s first academic position was at Clark University in Worcester, MA in 1934. He spent the summers working at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA, doing research in invertebrate neurophysiology, in part focusing on the role of acetylcholine in marine organisms. During this period he met Kenneth “Kacy” Cole and Howard “Bim” Curtis, American biophysicists who were working on the properties of nerve and muscle fibers, and with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. At MBL he also met Alan Hodgkin, Steve Kuffler and Albert Szent-Gyorgi, who were all to go on to make such major contributions to nerve and muscle physiology. For decades Ladd regularly attended the MBL to spend his summers in science there and became one of its Trustees. In 1939, in search of a larger and more research-oriented institution, Ladd accepted a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Urbana to teach Zoology. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was recruited by Cole to join a biomedical team in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project to study the effects of high-level radiation on humans and other animals. These findings later formed part of the basis for post-war radiation safety standards. 
    After the war, Ladd returned to the University of Illinois and in 1949, helped form the Physiology Department. There he began a 50-year career of teaching and research that included the training of about 45 doctoral students and numerous research fellows and associates. Among these, scientists such as Lloyd Barr, Geoff Burnstock, Andy Cossins, Brian Curtis, Asit Das, Mike Friedlander, Jeff Hazel, Madhu Kanungo, M. Kobayashi, Nick Kotchabhakdi, Jane Liu, Richard Meiss, Toshio Nagai, T. Tamaik, Bruce Sidell, Nick Sperelakis, Joe Szurszewski, Victor Wilson, and Jackie Wood, became heads, chairs or directors of physiology, biochemistry, biophysics or neuroscience in various states and countries. 
During the 1960s, Prosser was Head of Physiology at the University of Illinois. In 1962 he brought Biophysics into the Department, renaming it Physiology and Biophysics, an excellent pairing which lasted for more than three decades. Among the new physiologists and biophysicists that he recruited, Bill Sleator, Jim Heath, and Dennis Buetow, in turn, became Head of the Department. In the late 1950s, Ladd was instrumental in the building of Burrill Hall, which served as the site of a joint meeting of the American Physiological Society and the Society of General Physiologists (Fall, 1960). In the 1970s, he established the Neural and Behavioral Biology Graduate Program, later renamed the Neuroscience Program, an active interdisciplinary program currently comprising 60 faculty and numerous graduate students. 
    In the words of a national colleague, Prosser was “A statesman of science,” ever ready to serve and represent the needs of science and the scientists. He was the President of the Society of General Physiologists (1958), the American Society of Zoologists (1961), and the American Physiological Society (1969), and served as editor or on the editorial boards of such journals as American Journal of Physiology, Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry and Physiological Zoology. 
    From 1932 to 2002, Prosser produced seven books, over 50 reviews and monographs and nearly 150 research papers, exclusive of abstracts and reports. His most innovative book was “Adaptational Biology: From Molecules to Organisms” (Wiley, 1986) in which he tried to develop a unified theory of evolutionary adaptation by studying various levels of organismic complexity. Prosser’s magnum opus was his massive textbook of “Comparative Animal Physiology” (Wiley), which underwent four editions from 1950 to 1991 and was translated into three languages, including Russian. Through its pages, generations of students around the world were introduced to comparative physiology.
    During his retirement he wrote, lectured and traveled widely, and continued to train PhDs. He came to his laboratory in until 1997 when, following a serious hip fracture, he became homebound. Nevertheless, he continued working on his two books, “Scientific Autobiography and Personal Memoir” (Stipes Publishing, Champaign, 2001) and a more massive undertaking, “A History of Nerve, Muscle and Synapse Physiology” (E. Meisami, ed., due summer 2002).
    One of Prosser’s seminal discoveries was his early demonstration of spontaneous activity in the isolated nervous system of invertebrates. This finding was contrary to the prevailing views of the behaviorists, who thought that all behavior is stimulus-dependent, and led ultimately to modern-day views of central pattern generators in the nervous system. In the 1950s his research emphasis changed from nerve to muscle, particularly smooth muscle, its functional diversity and adaptation. In his words, “I decided that animal speed was due more to muscle than nervous system.” This focus remained central through the rest of his career. Among his theoretical insights was the concept of a relationship between muscle fiber size (diameter) and its speed of contraction. He also found novel intestinal slow waves and studied the biochemical and physiological adaptation of fish and marine invertebrates to changes in environmental temperature both in vivo and in vitro. Prosser received numerous awards and honors including election to the National Academy of Sciences (1974). He was truly a giant of comparative physiology and will be dearly missed by the many whose lives he touched. 
    Ladd Prosser leaves two daughters, a son, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. His older daughter, “Jane” Ellen Prosser Armstrong, lives in Woods Hole, his second daughter, Nancy Ladd Prosser Meinertzhagen, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his son, Loring Blanchard Prosser in Indianapolis. Ladd’s wife, Hazel Blanchard Prosser, died in 1999 at the age of 92, following an earlier stroke. 

Essie Meisami