Gerald Weissmann


Gerald Weissmann was an Austrian-born American physician/scientist, editor, and essayist. He was Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. He was editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal. At the time of his death he was its book review editor. In 1965, he was one of the discoverers of 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 Weissmann. 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. 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 in 1954. He also pursued an early career in art, exhibiting at a major New York gallery.

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. under Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa. Lewis Thomas then selected him as chief medical resident at Bellevue Hospital Center. Weissmann next worked at the Strangeways Research Laboratory, in Cambridge, England, studying cell biology under Dame Honor B. Fell until 1962. 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 of the Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole, MA. He was best known for having presented evidence that rheumatoid arthritis is an immune-complex disease. His laboratory found that crises in systemic lupus erythematosus are provoked by intravascular complement activation. Using a tissue culture system containing a mixture of both leukocytes and endothelial cells, he pioneered studies in both leukocyte activation, and the role of salicylates and corticosteroids in cell signaling and adhesion.
He was responsible for the co-discovery of liposomes in 1965 and credited with coining that name by the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language. He was a founder and a director of the Liposome Company, Inc., from 1982 to 2000. Two of its drugs, based on his work with liposomes, Abelcet and Myocet, are in clinical use. There are now over 940,000 references to liposomes on Google scholar Liposomes have been recognized for offering "one of the most successful drug delivery systems given their established utility and success in the clinic in the past 40-50 years." Weissmann has been acknowledged as "Liposome's Literary Founder."
Dr. Weissmann has received the two residencies at the , the Alessandro Robecchi and Paul Klemperer awards for inflammation research, as well as the Distinguished Investigator and Presidential Gold Medal Awards of the . He is a foreign member of the of Rome and the . 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 , the , and was the founding chairman of the jury for the Prix Galien .
From 1975 to 2001, Weissmann was the founding editor of the journal, ; from 1979 to 1984, he edited , and from 2006 to 2016 he served as editor-in-chief of . 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 and The Fevers of Reason. 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
  • They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus
  • The Doctor With Two Heads
  • The Doctor Dilemma
  • Democracy and DNA
  • Darwin's Audubon
  • The Year of the Genome
  • Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment
  • Mortal and Immortal DNA
  • Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter
  • ''The Fevers of Reason''

    Personal life

He married Ann Weissmann 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.