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 the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1950 and his 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 the Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York in New York City and active service as captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, he took 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, Cambridge England, studying cell biology under Dame Honor B. Fell to 1962. He returned to N.Y.U. School of Medicine, and has been on its faculty to date. 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 N.Y.U. in 1970, and served as Director of the Division of Rheumatology from 1973 to 1999. From 1970 to date, he has spent summers as an investigator and lecturer and has served for 18 years as a trustee at the Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole, MA. He is 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 is responsible for the codiscovery 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, and two drugs based on his liposome work are now in the clinic. There are now over 940,000 references to liposomes on Google scholar Liposomes have been recognized as "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 is a Master and past president of the American College of Rheumatology, a past president of the Harvey Society, a Fellow of the AAAS, 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 1975-2001, Weissmann was the founding editor of the journal, ; he edited from 1979-1984, and from 2006 to 2016 has served as the 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 has been 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:
He has been married to Ann Weissmann since 1953, and has two children, Lisa Beth Weissmann, MD of Mount Auburn Hospital Cambridge, MA and Andrew Weissmann, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the NYU School of Law.

Death

He died on July 10, 2019.