EDWARD WHEELER DEMPSEY 1911-1975
AM. J. ANAT., 144:
1-8.
EDWARDWHEELERDEMPSEY
EDWARDWHEELER DEMPSEY May 15, 1911 -January 9, 1975 Associate Editor, American Journal of Anatomy, 1974-1975
Edward W. Dempsey was a n extraordinary man. In a n age when outstanding scientific achievement came usually to those who devoted themselves to a n ever-narrowing speciality, he managed to make distinguished contributions to several widely different areas of anatomy and physiology. During a period when engagement with administrative duties excused the majority of senior investigators from useful contributions to science, Doctor Dempsey kept up a continuous flow of publications, even during a n unusually grueling decade as a dean, and, for a time, a Special Assistant for Health and Medical Affairs to the Secretary for Health, Education, and Welfare. When this was over, however, he returned to the laboratory with enthusiasm, and produced some of his most elegant electron microscopy, helping to refine and increase the capacity of a n entirely new technique which had been developed during his absence. What is all the more remarkable is that he shouldered the most complex, difficult, unfamiliar and stressful burdens of his varied career after suffering a heart attack of the sort that prompts most men to go on half-time rather than to redouble their efforts. Occasional remarks to his friends made it obvious that he knew he was living on borrowed time, but it was equally obvious that he was not going to let this make any difference to his style of life. It would be quite wrong to gather from all this that Doctor Dempsey was some sort of scientific machine, designed to turn out 150 journal articles and the innumerable memoranda and iterative revisions of health legislation which marked his Washington years. He was, on the contrary, a very warm human being, a n affectionate husband and father and, perhaps more remarkably, a greatly appreciated father-inlaw. His feeling for people combined with enthusiasm for his subject immediately aroused the interest and often a little later the deep affection of his students and
collaborators. It was always obvious that he really enjoyed sharing the enormous accumulation of fact and interpretation which he continuously absorbed from his wide reading or generated from his own experiments. And he never lost the habit, learned in those early Harvard days, of being actually i n contact with students during their scheduled laboratory hours. He seemed to take all his responsibilities equally seriously, but sometimes the warmth of feeling, which was such a n asset in his teaching, was felt in a n opposite sense by those who found it necessary to defend a different position on some administrative matters. Doctor Dempsey was born in a n Iowa coal-mining town and spent his boyhood and youth in rural Southeastern Ohio, where, like so many scientists of his generation, he learned how to use tools and improvise solutions to practical problems in physics and biology as encountered in rural life. His father, untutored beyond the eighth grade, had a natural bent for mechanical and electrical machinery, which he turned to making a living in maintenance and repair of mining machinery and, later, automobiles and trucks. Ed Dempsey drove an automobile from the age of eight and traveled widely as a high school and college student i n cars of his own rebuilding. Since much of his scientific contribution was made during the days when one felt lucky to get a grant of $500 or $600 every other year, his ability to make do with what lay already at hand was crucial to his success and that of some of his collaborators. Although he enjoyed chemistry and physics i n high school, graduating valedictorian in a class of sixteen, he would have gone no further in his education but for the vigorous insistence of his mother and father. His mother came from a large and remarkable family of rural background, which produced three physicians, three lawyers, a Ph.D . in history, two school3
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EDWARD WHEELER DEMPSEY
teachers and a farmer. With single-minded devotion to education, each individual studied until prepared to teach school, at which point he or she interrupted schooling to go to work and support the next sibling through college. At Marietta College, Ed Dempsey majored in biology and took all the science courses available. This large number of courses was attributable partly to a growing interest in science and partly to the need to make up for credits lost by his reluctance to get out of bed for eight o’clock classes. Some notes on the flyleaf of his copy of Bremer’s Histology indicate his early interest in bringing ideas from different disciplines together and presage his career in histochemistry by suggesting that the techniques of qualitative analysis could be applied to histological sections to characterize their chemical constitution. Finishing college, he was again ready to find a job and go to work, but jobs were scarce in 1932. Fortunately, Marietta was one of those small colleges which always had a professor on the alert to steer the occasional outstanding student onward to graduate school. H. R. Eggleston, professor of biology, had sent a number of students to graduate work at Brown University and he guided Ed Dempsey to a teaching assistantship there. For him this was at least a job but he soon discovered, apparently somewhat to his surprise, that it was also the most exciting and rewarding occupation he could imagine. At Brown, he developed the two threads of interest that wound throughout the remainder of his career, a delight in mechanical and electronic equipment and a n abiding interest in behavior. Under Professor William Young, he began studies on the endocrinology of reproductive behavior at a time when estrogen and progesterone had just been isolated. Using ovariectomized guinea pigs, he was able to restore reproductive behavior by a timed sequence of hormone injections, and he started publishing almost at once. Indeed, he often recalled how his first public presentation of his and Young’s findings on the role of progesterone in stimulating the onset of estrous behavior in the guinea pig called into opposition the combined powers of George Corner, Edgar Allen, P. E. Smith,
Herbert Evans, and F. L. Hisaw. They had all the prestige, as well as all the traditional theory behind them. But it turned out that he had the facts. It is a n interesting reflection of the way things happen in life, as well a s i n science, that when he abruptly left the meeting hall to walk off his agitation, he was approached by George Wislocki, who made immediate moves to reassure the young graduate student. A couple of years later he invited him to Harvard to begin the close personal and professional association which lasted until Wislocki’s death 20 years later. When Doctor Dempsey came to Harvard with a new Ph.D. and a National Research Council Fellowship i n 1937, his pursuit of the endocrinology of behavior had led him to want to understand the nervous system, so he began his work with David Rioch and soon developed collaborations with Arturo Rosenblueth and Robert Morison, both in the Department of Physiology. When, at the end of the year, Doctor Rioch left to start a Department of Neuropsychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, he offered Doctor Dempsey a position and the opportunity to study for the M.D., but he declined with the conviction that his research would always keep him in the laboratory. There was no permanent position available in Anatomy at Harvard at that time, but fortunately, a position became available in Physiology which Walter Cannon, near retirement, did not wish to fill permanently. It was offered to Doctor Dempsey with the understanding from Wislocki that in three years, when Doctor Bremer was to retire, a place would be available for him in Anatomy. Thus, he was able to continue his collaborative work in neurophysiology and to attain a secure and lasting stature as a pioneer in the area of thalamo-cortical relationships. The original idea behind these neurophysiological studies was to lay a groundwork for further understanding of the behavioral aspects of reproduction, but, as so often happens, neurophysiology itself became too absorbing and the strictly behavioral studies resulted in only two publications, although there were a number of interesting observations on the behavior of various animals with central nervous system lesions that never seemed quite sub-
OBITUARY
stantial enough for publication. In spite of the fact that the electrophysiological study of thalomo-cortical relations was absorbing most of his energies, he managed to pursue his interest in hypothalamic-hypophysial relationships with a couple of important papers on central control of thyroid secretion. One of these, published with his close friend and next-door neighbor, E. B. Astwood, undoubtedly contributed significantly to the latter’s formulation of the action of anti-thyroid drugs, a matter of continuing clinical importance. In a brief paper of personal reminiscences of his “Wanderings in Neuroendocrinology” shortly before his death, Doctor Dempsey began by saying, “It would have been pleasant had I realized sooner how my own observations were pointing toward neuroendocrine mechanisms. I regret that (the) quantitative importance of the hypophysial portal blood supply did not occur to me until Harris’ elegant surgical procedures made it abundantly clear.” It certainly would have been “pleasant” and it is odd that it did not. If we understood why, we would know a lot more about the fits and starts of scientific creativity than we actually do. Certainly, the group in the laboratory talked a lot about the problem; Wislocki had only recently demonstrated absolutely clearly that the portal system flowed down, and not up as Harvey Cushing had thought, and several of us had looked hard at the alternative suggestion of nervous connections to the anterior pituitary, without being convinced by the evidence. Dempsey himself commanded all the necessary techniques, including that of stalk section, and had come within what now seems a few Angstrom units of the right answer in his papers on control of the thyroid with Astwood and Uotila. But he never quite got it all together, and in the end, he simply had to express regret that “distractions deflected me only too often from the mainstream of neuroendocrine research.” In any case, when Doctor Dempsey returned to the Department of Anatomy at Harvard in 1941, he had come to the conclusion that further excursions into electrophysiology of the forebrain, however fascinating i n themselves, would not answer his neuroendocrinological inquiries,
5
so he turned his attention in the opposite direction, to the metabolic changes in such target organs as the thyroid, the uterus, and - most of all perhaps - the placenta. By this time, the interest of histologists was turning rapidly away from simple appearances, revealed by staining with exotic extracts or aniline dyes, to the quantative demonstration of biologically important molecules in cells and tissues. Remembering, Derhaps, those early notes in his college textbooks, Dempsey seized on these new concepts and techniques, and with his usual versatility, adopted them to studies of the placenta and other secretory and absorptive structures. Taken together, this extensive corpus of studies greatly expanded our store of quantitative information on the dye-binding properties of nucleic acids and proteins in tissues and the chemical nature and position of other large molecules, especially polysaccharides and lipids. Much of this work was published in collaboration with junior investigators and students attracted first to the Harvard laboratory, and later to St. Louis. A particularly productive association with Professor G. B. Wislocki continued without interruption even after Dempsey moved to assume the chairmanship of Anatomy at Washington University in St. Louis. While at Harvard, he developed a reputatian for warm encouragement and support of young anatomists, without relation to the area of study and unmarred by jealousy of others’ accomplishments. Wislocki depended greatly on him in the operation of the department, and in this capactiy he encouraged the development of each individual, considering it to be his role to see that no impediments stood in the way. At a time when grant money was rare he shared what he had. Here are some of the things Marcus Singer remembers about those days: “Ed was a naturally inventive person with mechanical and electronic equipment. It was easy for him to understand complicated gadgetry, repair it and devise new tricks for handling equipment. I remember with amusement, the one long fingernail he always preserved to use as a screwdriver, probe, or prying device. Ed was a witty companion who often dominated the social life of the department. He was never crude, impolite or spiteful. At
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EDWARD WHEELER DEMPSEY
worst he could be indifferent. On political outlook I suppose one would call him a liberal. I tend to classify h i m as one of those liberals more of the 1890’s type who was so sure of the survival of our society that h e could only observe left and right as unoffending curiosities. He was a self-made scholar who could find his way i n any society because of his natural scholarship and leadership talents. He seldom immersed himself i n student affairs; h e was of the old school, never ingratiating but always professional in his attitudes toward teaching. Ed could be rough in an argument and loved to debate. He was impatient with mediocrity but h e was very considerate of the underdog. He was a good colleague. I admired him for his ready brilliance, his ease of conversation, his generosity and trust, his relative simplicity of manner and his personal control. Indeed, I never remembered him upset or really angry. Some considered him very egoistic and indeed arrogant. In my judgement, this was mistaken for his brilliance and his wide interest in all subjects about which h e could justifiably speak with confidence.”
When he moved to Washington University in 1950 as chairman of the Department of Anatomy, Doctor Dempsey immediately set to work to rebuild the department along histochemical lines but soon became a pioneer once more, i n the new world of investigation opened up by the development of adequate preparative techniques for electron microscopy of biological material. As a truly physiological anatomist, he was not content simply to describe the wealth of new structural information that appeared with every micrograph, but was persistently experimental, correlating changes in structure with controlled alterations in functional state. The overall effect of these studies was to enlarge and thoroughly document the changing view of the placenta and certain other secretory and absorptive epithelia as active organs with complex structures closely related to the active selection, transport and storage of molecules, large and small. In his new situation he continued to attract medical students, hospital residents, postdoctoral fellows and young anatomists with his infectious enthusiasm for research. He gave them complete freedom, never directing but always ready to respond to questions, to review data and to offer specific and substantive help. Although this nondirective help was critical
to the development and publication of research, he never allowed his name to be listed among the authors or even acknowledged, for what he said was simply doing his job. In the midst of this beehive of activity, Doctor Dempsey was to be found either tinkering with the vagaries of those early electron microscopes until he knew them better than the service engineers, or talking endlessly with students and colleagues. From his all-encompassing memory he brought insights to bear on the spate of unexplained observations that flooded from the electron microscope. No question, however uninformed, went unanswered, and any assertion evoked in him a resourceful and vigorous devil’s advocate. He was typically to be seen, slouched deep in a chair with his legs draped over a n arm, the twinkle of debate in his eye, ready to expound on any subject or to dispute with all comers in numerically organized arrays of facts and arguments of logical beauty. He took the search for knowledge very seriously, while at the same time arguing effectively that truth as we can seek and know it must remain limited, relativistic and therefore evanescent. As a teacher he was shy and diffident, suffering such stage fright that he had to memorize the first paragraph of what he wished to say and deliver it i n stuttering hesitation. Yet once he warmed to his subject, his lectures were models of organization and clarity, always emphasizing the processes of thought and discovery by which facts are learned and understood. But he was appreciated most by his students for his availability, never too busy to stop and answer a question at length, opening new vistas of inquiry. His philosophy of teaching was to open up new knowledge rather than to codify it, to encourage curiosity rather than to indoctrinate, to share enthusiasm rather than to demand memorization. Those students who did not take advantage of the opportunity at the time eventually understood what a n opportunity it had been. Doctor Dempsey’s success as an administrator and teacher drew inevitable attention to him as a candidate for the deanship when this fell open in 1960. The school had a n unusual administrative setup. The governing body was the so-called Execu-
OBITUARY
tive Faculty, made up of the distinguished and forceful department heads. Technically, the dean served entirely at their pleasure and so, i n theory at least, was nothing more than a n administrative aide. Actually, the scheme usually worked out differently in practice, and it might better be described as a weak deanship habitually occupied by strong deans. Dempsey set out to be one of the strong deans, and, in most respects, he succeeded. He immediately recognized, for example, that the enormous increase in the flow of money rendered previous methods of budgeting and accounting obsolete. He therefore established a modern system of cost accounting which helped to maintain the school i n a sound financial position during the entire period of his deanship. In general, the basic sciences and the teaching program of the institution continued to flourish, but his previous experience had not fully prepared him for the intricate series of understandings, misunderstandings, friendships and hostilities that ordinarily govern the interaction of medical schools with their affiliated hospital. During times of financial stringency, the uneasy balance is often severely stressed as the medical school struggles to maintain excellence of teaching and medical care, and the hospital struggles equally devotedly to maintain a balanced budget. This is, perhaps, an oversimplification of the deteriorating situation which confronted Dean Dempsey. No outsider ever understands these things completely, but there seems no doubt that the later years of his deanship were not very happy and that wounds were received that never completely healed. But even this melancholy reflection may remind one, however wryly, of Ed Dempsey’s originality and foresight, when, one day back in 1942, he took advantage of a lull in an experiment to elaborate in complete detail the so-called Peter Principle, many years before its enunciation by Dr. Peter. I n spite of this uncanny anticipation of the perils of accepting positions of ever increasing difficulty, Dean Dempsey took leave from Washington University to become Special Assistant to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1964. President Johnson’s Great Society was just
7
coming to a boil, and for the next two years, he was engaged in trying to make practical sense of the many suggestions flying about the Capitol for the improvement of medical care, Earlier, a blueribbon committee, the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke, chaired by Dr. Michael DeBakey, had made many recommendations aimed at reducing the mortality, morbidity and economic consequences of three leading causes of death. Ed Dempsey was chairman of one of the subcommittees of this Commission responsible for a dramatic, albeit expensive, suggestion for regionalization of the care of heart disease, cancer, stroke and other related diseases. It was hoped that this would provide a model for possible rationalization of the delivery of all medical care in the United States. Specifically, it was hoped to make available to all individuals the best therapeutic techniques and treatments through the intimate involvement of medical schools cooperating with community hospitals and physicians. Together with Secretary Celebrezze, Doctor Dempsey worked hard to incorporate the more practical of the many suggestions into health legislation as ultimately outlined i n the President’s Health Message of 1965. His primary responsibility was to negotiate agreements on the profound changes with the interested parties in various parts of the government and private sector, maliy of whom had quite different ideas. This was a difficult assignment, especially for one who lacked the credentials of a medical degree and old school ties respected by the conventional health professions. On the other hand, his experience as a member of the original DeBakey Committee, earlier successful tours of duty on the National Advisory Health Council and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and his experience as dean of a medical school provided the essential substantive qualifications. He was able to carry through, from original Congressional testimony to completion, acts such as those providing for the new regional centers (Regional Medical Programs), financial aid for both students and schools of the health professions, community mental health centers and financial aid for medical libraries. It was a signifi-
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cant achievement, and Doctor Dempsey’s contribution was, in a way, a s surprising as it was substantial since almost all of his previous career had been devoted to the basic science of medicine rather than its organization and application in a turbulent political world. Once again, he showed his unusual ability to size up a new situation, identify critical variables and do what was necessary in a n imaginative way. In retrospect, 1965 saw the high water mark of Executive and Congressional enthusiasm for research and training in health care. Never before or since has so much health legislation been passed and signed into law by the President. Naturally, not all the innovations survived. Many have since been modified. However, the principle of increasing federal responsibility for funding health affairs is now well established. As the nation works out a reasonable solution to its health problems in the now sober seventies, it will profit greatly from studying both the successes and shortfalls of the bold social experiment Doctor Dempsey helped to formulate and bring to reality. Shortly after returning to St. Louis, he received a call to become professor and chairman of the distinguished Department of Anatomy at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. On the day of his arrival, he suffered a second heart attack. Nevertheless, he set about picking up the threads of his past interests and catching up with the new technique of electron beam scanning. Slowly, he picked up speed, publishing a paper a year until 1972, when he sent at least eight off to the press. One of these demonstrates better than anything until that time that the relatively weak electron beams of scanning electron microscopes can be used to elicit secondary X-ray emmissions which, in turn, identify and locate a wide range of biologically important chemical elements with a high degree of resolution. Another demonstrates with great vividness and precise resolution the changes which take place in the glomerulus of the kidney during experimental hypertension. Still another finds him back again in the nervous system, combining these new techniques with those used twenty and more years ago in collaboration with Wislocki to
strengthen the growing case that the puzzling area postrema is indeed a neuroendocrine organ like the pineal and posterior pituitary. This paper epitomized Doctor Dempsey’s investigative career, combining as it does his longstanding interest in the endocrine glands and the central nervous system with the development of ever more precise techniques to demonstrate how cells and membranes synthesize, filter, and exclude molecules of different shapes, sizes, and chemical properties. There must always be a sense of regret when so talented a life ends before its time, but Ed Dempsey packed a n unusual number of varied activities into the time he had and he was unusually generous in sharing his experiences, his ideas, his hopes, and even some of his fears, with his friends and collaborators. Those of US who had the privilege of working with him in the laboratory and in the classroom will always be grateful, As a statement of this gratitude, Helen Padykula’s words cannot be improved upon. ‘To think of Ed Dempsey is for me remembrance of the warmth and pleasure of good conversation -informal, stimulating, convivial, and without end. Many of us can visualize him perched on a lab bench as the conversation unfolded. This informal examination of science and related matters provided a comfortable arena for the education of young investigators and a challenging one for seasoned scientists. Ed was a discussant par excellence who pursued each topic with an insatiable appetite for new information as well as different angles of interpretation. Humor was an active ingredient in these exchanges which represent one of his significant contributions toward the progress of biomedical science. Others will recollect his dedication to administration, especially in relation to governmental policy. However, my recollection will always stem from his ability to offer his students and colleagues a life-long endorsement. This human underwriting encompassed the whole personality of the individual, not only his scientific abilities. Those of us fortunate to have been Ed’s friends have lost a rare companionship.”
R. S. MORISONAND S. L. CLARK,JR. 323 U t i s Hall, Cornell University, lthaca, N e w York and Department of A n a t o m y , Medical School, University of Massachusetts, Worcester, Massachusetts
AM. J. ANAT., 144:
1-8.
EDWARDWHEELERDEMPSEY
EDWARDWHEELER DEMPSEY May 15, 1911 -January 9, 1975 Associate Editor, American Journal of Anatomy, 1974-1975
Edward W. Dempsey was a n extraordinary man. In a n age when outstanding scientific achievement came usually to those who devoted themselves to a n ever-narrowing speciality, he managed to make distinguished contributions to several widely different areas of anatomy and physiology. During a period when engagement with administrative duties excused the majority of senior investigators from useful contributions to science, Doctor Dempsey kept up a continuous flow of publications, even during a n unusually grueling decade as a dean, and, for a time, a Special Assistant for Health and Medical Affairs to the Secretary for Health, Education, and Welfare. When this was over, however, he returned to the laboratory with enthusiasm, and produced some of his most elegant electron microscopy, helping to refine and increase the capacity of a n entirely new technique which had been developed during his absence. What is all the more remarkable is that he shouldered the most complex, difficult, unfamiliar and stressful burdens of his varied career after suffering a heart attack of the sort that prompts most men to go on half-time rather than to redouble their efforts. Occasional remarks to his friends made it obvious that he knew he was living on borrowed time, but it was equally obvious that he was not going to let this make any difference to his style of life. It would be quite wrong to gather from all this that Doctor Dempsey was some sort of scientific machine, designed to turn out 150 journal articles and the innumerable memoranda and iterative revisions of health legislation which marked his Washington years. He was, on the contrary, a very warm human being, a n affectionate husband and father and, perhaps more remarkably, a greatly appreciated father-inlaw. His feeling for people combined with enthusiasm for his subject immediately aroused the interest and often a little later the deep affection of his students and
collaborators. It was always obvious that he really enjoyed sharing the enormous accumulation of fact and interpretation which he continuously absorbed from his wide reading or generated from his own experiments. And he never lost the habit, learned in those early Harvard days, of being actually i n contact with students during their scheduled laboratory hours. He seemed to take all his responsibilities equally seriously, but sometimes the warmth of feeling, which was such a n asset in his teaching, was felt in a n opposite sense by those who found it necessary to defend a different position on some administrative matters. Doctor Dempsey was born in a n Iowa coal-mining town and spent his boyhood and youth in rural Southeastern Ohio, where, like so many scientists of his generation, he learned how to use tools and improvise solutions to practical problems in physics and biology as encountered in rural life. His father, untutored beyond the eighth grade, had a natural bent for mechanical and electrical machinery, which he turned to making a living in maintenance and repair of mining machinery and, later, automobiles and trucks. Ed Dempsey drove an automobile from the age of eight and traveled widely as a high school and college student i n cars of his own rebuilding. Since much of his scientific contribution was made during the days when one felt lucky to get a grant of $500 or $600 every other year, his ability to make do with what lay already at hand was crucial to his success and that of some of his collaborators. Although he enjoyed chemistry and physics i n high school, graduating valedictorian in a class of sixteen, he would have gone no further in his education but for the vigorous insistence of his mother and father. His mother came from a large and remarkable family of rural background, which produced three physicians, three lawyers, a Ph.D . in history, two school3
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EDWARD WHEELER DEMPSEY
teachers and a farmer. With single-minded devotion to education, each individual studied until prepared to teach school, at which point he or she interrupted schooling to go to work and support the next sibling through college. At Marietta College, Ed Dempsey majored in biology and took all the science courses available. This large number of courses was attributable partly to a growing interest in science and partly to the need to make up for credits lost by his reluctance to get out of bed for eight o’clock classes. Some notes on the flyleaf of his copy of Bremer’s Histology indicate his early interest in bringing ideas from different disciplines together and presage his career in histochemistry by suggesting that the techniques of qualitative analysis could be applied to histological sections to characterize their chemical constitution. Finishing college, he was again ready to find a job and go to work, but jobs were scarce in 1932. Fortunately, Marietta was one of those small colleges which always had a professor on the alert to steer the occasional outstanding student onward to graduate school. H. R. Eggleston, professor of biology, had sent a number of students to graduate work at Brown University and he guided Ed Dempsey to a teaching assistantship there. For him this was at least a job but he soon discovered, apparently somewhat to his surprise, that it was also the most exciting and rewarding occupation he could imagine. At Brown, he developed the two threads of interest that wound throughout the remainder of his career, a delight in mechanical and electronic equipment and a n abiding interest in behavior. Under Professor William Young, he began studies on the endocrinology of reproductive behavior at a time when estrogen and progesterone had just been isolated. Using ovariectomized guinea pigs, he was able to restore reproductive behavior by a timed sequence of hormone injections, and he started publishing almost at once. Indeed, he often recalled how his first public presentation of his and Young’s findings on the role of progesterone in stimulating the onset of estrous behavior in the guinea pig called into opposition the combined powers of George Corner, Edgar Allen, P. E. Smith,
Herbert Evans, and F. L. Hisaw. They had all the prestige, as well as all the traditional theory behind them. But it turned out that he had the facts. It is a n interesting reflection of the way things happen in life, as well a s i n science, that when he abruptly left the meeting hall to walk off his agitation, he was approached by George Wislocki, who made immediate moves to reassure the young graduate student. A couple of years later he invited him to Harvard to begin the close personal and professional association which lasted until Wislocki’s death 20 years later. When Doctor Dempsey came to Harvard with a new Ph.D. and a National Research Council Fellowship i n 1937, his pursuit of the endocrinology of behavior had led him to want to understand the nervous system, so he began his work with David Rioch and soon developed collaborations with Arturo Rosenblueth and Robert Morison, both in the Department of Physiology. When, at the end of the year, Doctor Rioch left to start a Department of Neuropsychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, he offered Doctor Dempsey a position and the opportunity to study for the M.D., but he declined with the conviction that his research would always keep him in the laboratory. There was no permanent position available in Anatomy at Harvard at that time, but fortunately, a position became available in Physiology which Walter Cannon, near retirement, did not wish to fill permanently. It was offered to Doctor Dempsey with the understanding from Wislocki that in three years, when Doctor Bremer was to retire, a place would be available for him in Anatomy. Thus, he was able to continue his collaborative work in neurophysiology and to attain a secure and lasting stature as a pioneer in the area of thalamo-cortical relationships. The original idea behind these neurophysiological studies was to lay a groundwork for further understanding of the behavioral aspects of reproduction, but, as so often happens, neurophysiology itself became too absorbing and the strictly behavioral studies resulted in only two publications, although there were a number of interesting observations on the behavior of various animals with central nervous system lesions that never seemed quite sub-
OBITUARY
stantial enough for publication. In spite of the fact that the electrophysiological study of thalomo-cortical relations was absorbing most of his energies, he managed to pursue his interest in hypothalamic-hypophysial relationships with a couple of important papers on central control of thyroid secretion. One of these, published with his close friend and next-door neighbor, E. B. Astwood, undoubtedly contributed significantly to the latter’s formulation of the action of anti-thyroid drugs, a matter of continuing clinical importance. In a brief paper of personal reminiscences of his “Wanderings in Neuroendocrinology” shortly before his death, Doctor Dempsey began by saying, “It would have been pleasant had I realized sooner how my own observations were pointing toward neuroendocrine mechanisms. I regret that (the) quantitative importance of the hypophysial portal blood supply did not occur to me until Harris’ elegant surgical procedures made it abundantly clear.” It certainly would have been “pleasant” and it is odd that it did not. If we understood why, we would know a lot more about the fits and starts of scientific creativity than we actually do. Certainly, the group in the laboratory talked a lot about the problem; Wislocki had only recently demonstrated absolutely clearly that the portal system flowed down, and not up as Harvey Cushing had thought, and several of us had looked hard at the alternative suggestion of nervous connections to the anterior pituitary, without being convinced by the evidence. Dempsey himself commanded all the necessary techniques, including that of stalk section, and had come within what now seems a few Angstrom units of the right answer in his papers on control of the thyroid with Astwood and Uotila. But he never quite got it all together, and in the end, he simply had to express regret that “distractions deflected me only too often from the mainstream of neuroendocrine research.” In any case, when Doctor Dempsey returned to the Department of Anatomy at Harvard in 1941, he had come to the conclusion that further excursions into electrophysiology of the forebrain, however fascinating i n themselves, would not answer his neuroendocrinological inquiries,
5
so he turned his attention in the opposite direction, to the metabolic changes in such target organs as the thyroid, the uterus, and - most of all perhaps - the placenta. By this time, the interest of histologists was turning rapidly away from simple appearances, revealed by staining with exotic extracts or aniline dyes, to the quantative demonstration of biologically important molecules in cells and tissues. Remembering, Derhaps, those early notes in his college textbooks, Dempsey seized on these new concepts and techniques, and with his usual versatility, adopted them to studies of the placenta and other secretory and absorptive structures. Taken together, this extensive corpus of studies greatly expanded our store of quantitative information on the dye-binding properties of nucleic acids and proteins in tissues and the chemical nature and position of other large molecules, especially polysaccharides and lipids. Much of this work was published in collaboration with junior investigators and students attracted first to the Harvard laboratory, and later to St. Louis. A particularly productive association with Professor G. B. Wislocki continued without interruption even after Dempsey moved to assume the chairmanship of Anatomy at Washington University in St. Louis. While at Harvard, he developed a reputatian for warm encouragement and support of young anatomists, without relation to the area of study and unmarred by jealousy of others’ accomplishments. Wislocki depended greatly on him in the operation of the department, and in this capactiy he encouraged the development of each individual, considering it to be his role to see that no impediments stood in the way. At a time when grant money was rare he shared what he had. Here are some of the things Marcus Singer remembers about those days: “Ed was a naturally inventive person with mechanical and electronic equipment. It was easy for him to understand complicated gadgetry, repair it and devise new tricks for handling equipment. I remember with amusement, the one long fingernail he always preserved to use as a screwdriver, probe, or prying device. Ed was a witty companion who often dominated the social life of the department. He was never crude, impolite or spiteful. At
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EDWARD WHEELER DEMPSEY
worst he could be indifferent. On political outlook I suppose one would call him a liberal. I tend to classify h i m as one of those liberals more of the 1890’s type who was so sure of the survival of our society that h e could only observe left and right as unoffending curiosities. He was a self-made scholar who could find his way i n any society because of his natural scholarship and leadership talents. He seldom immersed himself i n student affairs; h e was of the old school, never ingratiating but always professional in his attitudes toward teaching. Ed could be rough in an argument and loved to debate. He was impatient with mediocrity but h e was very considerate of the underdog. He was a good colleague. I admired him for his ready brilliance, his ease of conversation, his generosity and trust, his relative simplicity of manner and his personal control. Indeed, I never remembered him upset or really angry. Some considered him very egoistic and indeed arrogant. In my judgement, this was mistaken for his brilliance and his wide interest in all subjects about which h e could justifiably speak with confidence.”
When he moved to Washington University in 1950 as chairman of the Department of Anatomy, Doctor Dempsey immediately set to work to rebuild the department along histochemical lines but soon became a pioneer once more, i n the new world of investigation opened up by the development of adequate preparative techniques for electron microscopy of biological material. As a truly physiological anatomist, he was not content simply to describe the wealth of new structural information that appeared with every micrograph, but was persistently experimental, correlating changes in structure with controlled alterations in functional state. The overall effect of these studies was to enlarge and thoroughly document the changing view of the placenta and certain other secretory and absorptive epithelia as active organs with complex structures closely related to the active selection, transport and storage of molecules, large and small. In his new situation he continued to attract medical students, hospital residents, postdoctoral fellows and young anatomists with his infectious enthusiasm for research. He gave them complete freedom, never directing but always ready to respond to questions, to review data and to offer specific and substantive help. Although this nondirective help was critical
to the development and publication of research, he never allowed his name to be listed among the authors or even acknowledged, for what he said was simply doing his job. In the midst of this beehive of activity, Doctor Dempsey was to be found either tinkering with the vagaries of those early electron microscopes until he knew them better than the service engineers, or talking endlessly with students and colleagues. From his all-encompassing memory he brought insights to bear on the spate of unexplained observations that flooded from the electron microscope. No question, however uninformed, went unanswered, and any assertion evoked in him a resourceful and vigorous devil’s advocate. He was typically to be seen, slouched deep in a chair with his legs draped over a n arm, the twinkle of debate in his eye, ready to expound on any subject or to dispute with all comers in numerically organized arrays of facts and arguments of logical beauty. He took the search for knowledge very seriously, while at the same time arguing effectively that truth as we can seek and know it must remain limited, relativistic and therefore evanescent. As a teacher he was shy and diffident, suffering such stage fright that he had to memorize the first paragraph of what he wished to say and deliver it i n stuttering hesitation. Yet once he warmed to his subject, his lectures were models of organization and clarity, always emphasizing the processes of thought and discovery by which facts are learned and understood. But he was appreciated most by his students for his availability, never too busy to stop and answer a question at length, opening new vistas of inquiry. His philosophy of teaching was to open up new knowledge rather than to codify it, to encourage curiosity rather than to indoctrinate, to share enthusiasm rather than to demand memorization. Those students who did not take advantage of the opportunity at the time eventually understood what a n opportunity it had been. Doctor Dempsey’s success as an administrator and teacher drew inevitable attention to him as a candidate for the deanship when this fell open in 1960. The school had a n unusual administrative setup. The governing body was the so-called Execu-
OBITUARY
tive Faculty, made up of the distinguished and forceful department heads. Technically, the dean served entirely at their pleasure and so, i n theory at least, was nothing more than a n administrative aide. Actually, the scheme usually worked out differently in practice, and it might better be described as a weak deanship habitually occupied by strong deans. Dempsey set out to be one of the strong deans, and, in most respects, he succeeded. He immediately recognized, for example, that the enormous increase in the flow of money rendered previous methods of budgeting and accounting obsolete. He therefore established a modern system of cost accounting which helped to maintain the school i n a sound financial position during the entire period of his deanship. In general, the basic sciences and the teaching program of the institution continued to flourish, but his previous experience had not fully prepared him for the intricate series of understandings, misunderstandings, friendships and hostilities that ordinarily govern the interaction of medical schools with their affiliated hospital. During times of financial stringency, the uneasy balance is often severely stressed as the medical school struggles to maintain excellence of teaching and medical care, and the hospital struggles equally devotedly to maintain a balanced budget. This is, perhaps, an oversimplification of the deteriorating situation which confronted Dean Dempsey. No outsider ever understands these things completely, but there seems no doubt that the later years of his deanship were not very happy and that wounds were received that never completely healed. But even this melancholy reflection may remind one, however wryly, of Ed Dempsey’s originality and foresight, when, one day back in 1942, he took advantage of a lull in an experiment to elaborate in complete detail the so-called Peter Principle, many years before its enunciation by Dr. Peter. I n spite of this uncanny anticipation of the perils of accepting positions of ever increasing difficulty, Dean Dempsey took leave from Washington University to become Special Assistant to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1964. President Johnson’s Great Society was just
7
coming to a boil, and for the next two years, he was engaged in trying to make practical sense of the many suggestions flying about the Capitol for the improvement of medical care, Earlier, a blueribbon committee, the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke, chaired by Dr. Michael DeBakey, had made many recommendations aimed at reducing the mortality, morbidity and economic consequences of three leading causes of death. Ed Dempsey was chairman of one of the subcommittees of this Commission responsible for a dramatic, albeit expensive, suggestion for regionalization of the care of heart disease, cancer, stroke and other related diseases. It was hoped that this would provide a model for possible rationalization of the delivery of all medical care in the United States. Specifically, it was hoped to make available to all individuals the best therapeutic techniques and treatments through the intimate involvement of medical schools cooperating with community hospitals and physicians. Together with Secretary Celebrezze, Doctor Dempsey worked hard to incorporate the more practical of the many suggestions into health legislation as ultimately outlined i n the President’s Health Message of 1965. His primary responsibility was to negotiate agreements on the profound changes with the interested parties in various parts of the government and private sector, maliy of whom had quite different ideas. This was a difficult assignment, especially for one who lacked the credentials of a medical degree and old school ties respected by the conventional health professions. On the other hand, his experience as a member of the original DeBakey Committee, earlier successful tours of duty on the National Advisory Health Council and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and his experience as dean of a medical school provided the essential substantive qualifications. He was able to carry through, from original Congressional testimony to completion, acts such as those providing for the new regional centers (Regional Medical Programs), financial aid for both students and schools of the health professions, community mental health centers and financial aid for medical libraries. It was a signifi-
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EDWARD WHEELER DEMPSEY
cant achievement, and Doctor Dempsey’s contribution was, in a way, a s surprising as it was substantial since almost all of his previous career had been devoted to the basic science of medicine rather than its organization and application in a turbulent political world. Once again, he showed his unusual ability to size up a new situation, identify critical variables and do what was necessary in a n imaginative way. In retrospect, 1965 saw the high water mark of Executive and Congressional enthusiasm for research and training in health care. Never before or since has so much health legislation been passed and signed into law by the President. Naturally, not all the innovations survived. Many have since been modified. However, the principle of increasing federal responsibility for funding health affairs is now well established. As the nation works out a reasonable solution to its health problems in the now sober seventies, it will profit greatly from studying both the successes and shortfalls of the bold social experiment Doctor Dempsey helped to formulate and bring to reality. Shortly after returning to St. Louis, he received a call to become professor and chairman of the distinguished Department of Anatomy at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. On the day of his arrival, he suffered a second heart attack. Nevertheless, he set about picking up the threads of his past interests and catching up with the new technique of electron beam scanning. Slowly, he picked up speed, publishing a paper a year until 1972, when he sent at least eight off to the press. One of these demonstrates better than anything until that time that the relatively weak electron beams of scanning electron microscopes can be used to elicit secondary X-ray emmissions which, in turn, identify and locate a wide range of biologically important chemical elements with a high degree of resolution. Another demonstrates with great vividness and precise resolution the changes which take place in the glomerulus of the kidney during experimental hypertension. Still another finds him back again in the nervous system, combining these new techniques with those used twenty and more years ago in collaboration with Wislocki to
strengthen the growing case that the puzzling area postrema is indeed a neuroendocrine organ like the pineal and posterior pituitary. This paper epitomized Doctor Dempsey’s investigative career, combining as it does his longstanding interest in the endocrine glands and the central nervous system with the development of ever more precise techniques to demonstrate how cells and membranes synthesize, filter, and exclude molecules of different shapes, sizes, and chemical properties. There must always be a sense of regret when so talented a life ends before its time, but Ed Dempsey packed a n unusual number of varied activities into the time he had and he was unusually generous in sharing his experiences, his ideas, his hopes, and even some of his fears, with his friends and collaborators. Those of US who had the privilege of working with him in the laboratory and in the classroom will always be grateful, As a statement of this gratitude, Helen Padykula’s words cannot be improved upon. ‘To think of Ed Dempsey is for me remembrance of the warmth and pleasure of good conversation -informal, stimulating, convivial, and without end. Many of us can visualize him perched on a lab bench as the conversation unfolded. This informal examination of science and related matters provided a comfortable arena for the education of young investigators and a challenging one for seasoned scientists. Ed was a discussant par excellence who pursued each topic with an insatiable appetite for new information as well as different angles of interpretation. Humor was an active ingredient in these exchanges which represent one of his significant contributions toward the progress of biomedical science. Others will recollect his dedication to administration, especially in relation to governmental policy. However, my recollection will always stem from his ability to offer his students and colleagues a life-long endorsement. This human underwriting encompassed the whole personality of the individual, not only his scientific abilities. Those of us fortunate to have been Ed’s friends have lost a rare companionship.”
R. S. MORISONAND S. L. CLARK,JR. 323 U t i s Hall, Cornell University, lthaca, N e w York and Department of A n a t o m y , Medical School, University of Massachusetts, Worcester, Massachusetts
