James J. Mongan, MD, professor of health care policy and of social medicine at Harvard Medical School, died May 3 at the age of 69. From 1991 until his death, Dr. Mongan served as a member of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. He was on the boards of the American Hospital Association and the Kaiser Family Foundation, and was a member of the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission established by Congress and of the Institute of Medicine's Commission on the Consequences of Uninsurance.
Dr. Mongan earned his MD at Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed internship at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco and served two years in the public health service. He served for seven years on the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, where he worked to formulate Medicare and Medicaid legislation before serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for health policy in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He subsequently served as associate director for health on the domestic policy staff and as assistant surgeon general during the Carter administration.
Prior to joining Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in 1996 as president, Dr. Mongan served 15 years as Executive Director of the Truman Medical Center in Kansas City and as Dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. During his tenure at MGH, Dr. Mongan also served as president and chief executive officer of Partners HealthCare, a nonprofit health care system founded by Brigham and Women's Hospital and MGH.
Dr. Mongan was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bruce Tune
Bruce Tune, MD, founder of the Division of Pediatric Nephrology at the Stanford University School of medicine, died in June at the age of 71.
Dr. Tune earned both his undergraduate and MD degrees at Stanford, where he also served nearly his entire career. After earning his MD in 1965, he completed internship at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY, and a residency in pediatrics at Stanford. He then joined the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC, to conduct research. Over the course of his career, Dr. Tune's publications included scientific papers on the nephrotoxicity of cephalosporin antibiotics.
He returned to Stanford in 1969 as chief resident in pediatrics, and was subsequently offered the opportunity to start the Division of Pediatric Nephrology. Dr. Tune played a key role in the development of the pediatric kidney transplant program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. He served as acting chair of the Department of Pediatrics while the search for a replacement for Irving Schulman, MD was being conducted from 1991-1993.
Peter Wood
Peter Wood, PhD, DSc, an emeritus professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, died in March at the age of 81. Dr. Wood was a pioneer in research on the effects of diet, exercise and weight loss on cholesterol and heart disease. Dr. Wood was an avid runner and participated in numerous marathons, including 13 Boston marathons and six New York marathons. As such, he came to recognize a correlation between running and cholesterol levels. His observation paved the way for a series of studies that have shaped current guidelines promoting regular physical activity, weight maintenance and low-fat diet to reduce the risk for heart disease.
Dr. Wood was a native of London, England. He earned his undergraduate and master's degrees in chemistry, as well as his PhD in lipid biochemistry, from the University of London. He moved to the United States in 1962 to begin his research at the Institute for Metabolic Research in Oakland, CA. In 1969, he joined Stanford University as a research associate in the Department of Medicine.
At Stanford, he collaborated with John Farquhar, MD, Nathan Maccoby, PhD, and William Haskell, PhD, on two large National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. One of the grants was focused on testing the effects of a public-education campaign aimed at reducing heart disease risks. The other grant established 12 lipid research clinics that collaborated on a large-scale investigation, and Dr. Wood served as head of the clinic at Stanford. The study yielded the first evidence that lowering an individual's level of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol reduced the risk for heart attack. The lipid research clinic at Stanford evolved into the Stanford Prevention Research Center, with Drs. Farquhar, Haskell, Maccoby and Wood as its founders. Dr. Wood retired from Stanford in 1994.
Ken Wolf
Ken Wolf, MD, internationally recognized expert in neuroanatomy and emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), died in June. Dr. Wolf's research focused on the structural and functional aspects of central nervous system myelination, and his work has served as a foundation for understating myelin-deficiency neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Wolf received continuous support for his work through National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funding for 25 years.
Dr. Wolf earned his MD from Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1956. He then completed an internship in medicine at the former Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and served as a medical research associate at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness, now known as the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), of the NIH. He completed a research fellowship in neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and served as a U.S. Public Health Service Postdoctoral Fellow in Neurology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). He joined the faculty of HMS in 1964 as an instructor of anatomy, and subsequently served as assistant professor of neuropathology and then professor of neuropathology. Dr. Wolf began teaching neuroanatomy at UMMS in 1971, where he accepted a tenured post as professor of cell biology in 1972. He remained at UMMS until his retirement in 2008.
Dr. Wolf was honored with the UMMS Lamar Soutter Award for Excellence in Medical Education in 2008. He was a member of numerous professional organizations, including the American Society for Neurochemistry, the American Association of Anatomists, and the Society for Neuroscience. In addition to his accomplishments within the field of medicine, Dr. Wolf was also a talented musician. A child prodigy, he earned a degree in music from Yale University at the age of 14. Dr. Wolf shared his musical talent with colleagues by performing at the UMMS Commencement ceremonies.