Faculty

Below are 2 newsletters from the formative days of the medical school which includes a listing of the faculty as of the arrival of the Charter Class and 2 years later. (submitted by BA)

James Brophy

Listed in practice in La Jolla

Elizabeth Barrett Conner

A razor sharp and vivacious personality, I indelibly remember her lecture discussing the flaws in estrogen as a cure-all articles appearing at that time in the medical literature as my first appreciation of the statistical errors in poorly controlled clinical studies. (SS)

NYT Obit 2019

Diabetes Care Obit 2019

James Conner

Gordon Gill

The folowing obituary link was submitted by KH

Dr. Gordon Nelson Gill Obituary - Montgomery Advertiser

Ruben Gittes

Probably wouldn't be acceptable today but I remember him opening one of his lectures with a full frontal nude male with a penis and breasts-he didn't say a word for a minute or two. (SS)

Obituary from 2004 Canadian Journal of Urology "Legends in Urology" series

https://www.canjurol.com/legends.php?ID=3071

Nicholas Halasz

UCSD Obit 1999

UC Obit 1999

Cecil Hougie

San Diego Union Obit 2010

Arnold Mandel

From Wikipedia:

Born in 1934, in Chicago, Illinois, he received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1954 and his M.D. from Tulane University in 1958. Founding chairman in 1969 of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, ^[1] he was, at the time of his appointment, the youngest physician ever appointed as a chairman of a medical school psychiatry program in the U.S.^[2] An early biological psychiatrist, the department was the first in the U.S. to be biologically oriented. After leaving UCSD, he has been involved in studying the basic science and applied mathematics of brain activity and behavior.^[3]

https://profiles.ucsd.edu/arnold.mandell

NY Times article

Steven Mayer and Willard VanDerlaan

Drs. Steven E. Mayer, Ph.D. and Dr. Willard VanderLaan were my key research advisors at UCSD SOM. Please find the attached link for the obituary of Steven E. Mayer. and some notes below regarding both Dr. Mayer and Dr. VanderLaan.

Dr. Streven E. Mayer's Obituary link from the ASPET Society

https://www.aspet.org/aspet/news/news/2010/06/29/Steven-Edward-Mayer-(1929-2010)

In 1969 Dr. Steven E. Mayer left his 12-year position in the Department of Pharmacology at Emory University to join the University of California at San Diego as Professor of Medicine and UCSD SOM Director of the Division of Pharmacology. Starting in later 1969, Dr. Mayer kindly allowed me to work in his laboratory in the medical school building on initial studies of developing and performing assays of cyclic AMP. Ultimately this work led to defining the role of cyclic AMP in thyroid function that, in turn, led to a collaborative relationship between UCSD’s SOM pharmacology laboratory and the Endocrinology Division Laboratory at the UCSD SOM affiliate Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation directed by Dr. VanderLaan, Director of the Endocrinology Division of the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation. Over the next 3 ½ years, in parallel with my UCSD’s SOM basic science training, and subsequent clinical training/rotations as well, I had the pleasure of working in the respective laboratories of Dr. Mayer (UCSD SOM bldg) and Dr. Willard VanderLaan (Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation). In Dr. VanderLaan's laboratory I worked predominantly with performing growth hormone assays and working with mouse and rat pituitaries that were maintained in vitro in order to test release properties of pituitary hormones. Dr. Vanderlaan and his team were experts on the growth hormone and prolactin. His work on prolactin with co-investigator Urban Lewis, Ph.D. discovered many of the key structural components that make up prolactin. It is now recognized that prolactin and receptors for prolactin are not only central to the processes of lactation but also tied to the origins of select cancers (e.g., glioblastoma); work is ongoing to the design of medications that target prolactin receptors linked to select cancer growth. While working with both wonderful researchers, I was fortunate to publish 3 papers, 2 in Endocrinology.

1. Wilkins, J.N., Mayer, S.E. and Vanderlaan, W.P. The effects of hypothroidism, 2, 4-dinitrophenol and cyclic-AMP on growth hormone synthesis. Federation Proceedings, 30:533, 1971.

2. Sinha, Y.N., Wilkins, J.N., Selby, F. and VanderLaan, W.P. Pituitary and serum growth hormone during under-nutrition and catch-up growth in young rats. Endocrinology 92(6):1768-1771, 1973.

3. Wilkins, J.N., Mayer, S.E. and VanderLaan, W.P. The effects of hyperthyroidism and 2,4-dinitrophenol on growth hormone synthesis. Endocrinology 95(5):1259-1267, 1974.

BTW, I also had the pleasure of attending a lecture by our Dr. Linus Pauling at Cal Tech before he joined UCSD and then took his Biochemistry course at Revelle during the second year of our medical school (very complicated). Also, Marc Schuckit (my resident during UCSD's Psychiatry rotation in our 3rd or 4th year of medical school worked with Arnold Mandell and subsequently became a national leader in the understanding and treatment of alcohol use disorder and other addictions (in addition to becoming a psychiatrist at UCLA right after completing the UCSD medical internship, I also became an Addiction Psychiatrist and founded training programs for the training of psychiatrists to become addiction psychiatrists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Our class may also not know that George Koob, Ph.D., now the Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism joined UCSD and Scripps just as we were leaving our internal medicine internships at UCSD.

Walle Nauta

Dr Nauta was a visiting professor for a few weeks as part of our neuroanatomy course. He was physically impressive, tall and regal in bearing. He was constantly smoking a pipe, whose aroma would precede his apprearance to check your work. He was a natural raconteur-with an endless collection of anecdotes about growing up in Indonesia. (SS)

National Academy of Sciences Biography:

http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/nauta-walle-j-h.pdf

William Nyhan

From Wikipedia

William Leo Nyhan (born March 13, 1926) is an American physician best known as the co-discoverer of Lesch–Nyhan syndrome.

Nyhan currently serves as professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine in La Jolla, California. He has held positions at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine and has served on a number of advisory committees, pediatric advisory boards, and research foundation boards.

Nyhan's areas of research span a variety of amino acid metabolism disorders, among them 4-hydroxybutyric aciduria, 3-methylglutaconyl-Co A hydratase deficiency, multiple carboxylase deficiency, methylmalonic acidemia, and propionic acidemia. He has studied the neuropathology of propionic acidemia, including the manifestation of basal ganglia infarction and its neurologic, non-metabolic presentation. Currently, he conducts research into the causes of progressive neurologic disability caused by methylmalonic acidemia following liver transplantation.

He is involved in the ongoing development of tandem mass spectrometry for use in newborn screening and research. In addition, he is investigating the use of dichloroacetate to treat a broad range of mitochondrial diseases that lead to lactic acidemia.

Marshall Orloff

I have three memories regarding our surgery rotation with him:His famous P-C shunt procedure required a medical student to stand in the right upper quadrant with a Deaver holding a gigantic liver out of the way for six hours. I did this once - arms and back aching - and just as he was wrapping up, a second jaundiced “flapper” hit the ER. He told me to scrub in again. At the time, I thought it was a compliment, but after a total of ten hours, I changed my mind. Jeff and I remembered calling them “black mole rounds” because all we got to see was the mole on the back of Orloff’s neck. I told him about it at our 40th reunion. Tom, Jack, Pete, and I had three pets in a terrarium Pete made: an 11 ft anaconda, a horned toad, and an iguana. We gave them the random names of Eugene, Averill, and Marshall. Orloff was hysterical when I told him- he ran over to tell his wife. (MK)

UCSD Obit 2018

Lola Schwartz aka Lola Romanucci-Ross

Tribute

J Edwin Seegmiller

Wikipedia

Jay Seegmiller was born into a Mormon family in the small town of St. George in southwestern Utah. He attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where he majored in chemistry and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1942. He then served in the US Army. After the war, he went to medical school and received his Doctor of Medicine degree with honors from the University of Chicago in 1948. After an internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, he trained at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Disease (NIAMD),^[1] a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

He then worked as a research associate at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory at Harvard Medical School and as a visiting investigator at the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York. Seegmiller returned to NIH in 1954. He was appointed senior investigator at NIAMD, and in time became Chief of Human Biochemical Genetics.

In 1969 Seegmiller started on his second career. He left NIH to become a founding faculty member of the new Medical School of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and became the first head of the Arthritis Division of the Department of Medicine.

Seegmiller embarked on his third and last career in 1983 when he was appointed founding Director of the Stein Institute for Research on Aging (SIRA) at UCSD.

Seegmiller was given the United States Public Health (USPHS) Distinguished Service Award in 1969. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. He was honored as Master of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) in 1992.

Jay Seegmiller died after a brief respiratory illness in La Jolla, California. He was survived by his second wife Barbara (his first wife Roberta died in 1992), 2 sons, 2 daughters, 7 grandchildren, and 2 great-grandchildren.

In 1964 medical student Michael Lesch and pediatric faculty member Bill Nyhan at Johns Hopkins Hospital reported finding an X-linked recessive disorder in two young brothers with progressive mental retardation and a bizarre tendency to self-mutilation. Because the boys had abnormally high blood levels of uric acid, Lesch and Nyhan called it A familial disorder of uric acid metabolism and central nervous system function.^[2]

It was only three years until the biochemical basis of the disease was identified by Jay Seegmiller and his colleagues at NIH. They discovered that this rare genetic disease, Lesch–Nyhan syndrome, was due to a profound deficiency of an enzyme known as hypoxanthine guanine phosphoribosyltransferase, or HGPRT, for short.^[3]

Seegmiller's laboratory team at NIH went on to discover that some men have partial HGPRT deficiency that causes high levels of uric acid in the blood and leads to the development of gouty arthritis and the formation of uric acid stones in the urinary tract. This condition has been named Kelley–Seegmiller syndrome.

Hal Simon

La Jolla Obit 2013

Burton Sobel

Attached is an obit for Burt Sobel written in Circulation by Braunwald. Typical of Gene, it captures Burt quite well, and is especially poignant since I do believe Burt thought of himself as "Gene's fair-haired boy." In the overview of Burt's academic training, Gene skirts past the revelation that Burt never did a fellowship in cardiology (he was a Metabolism Fellow at the NIH), yet became such a force in that field. It said something about Burt's brilliance, and Gene's, as well, to recruit Burt as CCU Director given his background. In my medical school training, as one of his first fellows at Wash. U., and as a faculty member under him, I learned a great deal from Burt - clinical cardiology, how to become a scientist, and even more about "political science." I believe this third category taught me the most about negotiating the shoals of academics and the path forward in developing a clinical program, as well. (MK)

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.113.004008

Henry Wheeler

UCSD Obit 2001

Samuel S.C. Yen

UCSD Obit 2006