AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 157:535–536 (2015)
Obituary: William A. Stini (1930–2014) G. Philip Rightmire* Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138
Dr. William A. Stini died on June 22, 2014, after battling cancer. Bill, as he was widely known, was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1930, went through school there, and was soon married to Ruth Kalous, who would be his companion and trusted confidant for 64 years. They had three daughters. Bill earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1960. He briefly pursued a career in the paper industry with Kimberly-Clark but found this routine unsatisfying. He and Ruth then made the important decision to return to the University of Wisconsin, where Bill would get further training in the life sciences. When I arrived in Madison in the fall of 1964, Bill and his young family were already in residence. Bill was a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, studying with William S. Laughlin and Richard H. Osborne. We were both intrigued by the new and (at the time) quite innovative program in Human Biology, offering an interdisciplinary route to the PhD. Students in biological anthropology, zoology, anatomy, medical genetics, or related fields were encouraged to participate. Bill and I were given support under a National Institute for Dental Research Training Grant, and we spent the next few years rushing from seminars in anthropology to the zoology laboratories, the medical school, and back again. I remember one long semester doing comparative anatomy, where we encouraged one another in the lab and shared observations as we picked and sliced our way through the sharks, frogs, colorfully perfused cats, and other creatures that had given their bodies, willingly or not, to the pursuit of science. It was hard work but worth the effort. When it was time to plan a program of research, Bill focused on nutrition, health, and disease in human populations. In 1967 and 1968, with support from the training grant, he arranged to carry out field work in Heliconia, located in the Cordillera Central of the Columbian Andes. The project involved gathering anthropometrics, conducting serological tests, and studying hand-wrist X-rays from children and adult subjects. Most of the Heliconia residents were living in a continual state of malnutrition, and some had kwashiorkor and marasmus. Bill was particularly interested in the effects of protein deficiency on skeletal maturation of apparently healthy boys and girls. He found that skeletal maturation was delayed in the Heliconia children compared to US standards. Females appeared to experience a form of catch-up growth beginning in the preadolescent period, while males were more severely affected throughout early life. As a result, there was a reduction in stature most pronounced in boys and a concomitant reduction in sexual dimorphism for overall body size. Bill offered a synthesis of these results in his UW doctoral dissertation, presented in 1969.
Ó 2015 WILEY PERIODICALS, INC.
After Wisconsin, Bill and Ruth moved to the shores of Lake Cayuga in upstate New York, where Bill was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. During his years at Cornell, Bill continued to develop his interests in the role of nutrition in human evolution, publishing articles in mainstream journals and giving numerous lectures to professional societies. In a 1971 article in American Anthropologist, Bill drew on his Heliconia observations, suggesting that a striking aspect of human adaptation to nutritional deficiency is a general miniaturization of both sexes, without loss of proportionality. Such a response should be adaptive, and Bill hypothesized that the reduction in body size seen in tropical agricultural populations across the world is likely an example of evolution in process. Since the beginning of the Neolithic, a reliance on agriculture coupled with reduced animal protein intake and increased disease exposure tied to urbanization have tended to create a niche in which large size is maladaptive. As a consequence, the limits of human developmental plasticity have been tested, with an accompanying high cost in infant and child mortalities. *Correspondence to: G. Philip Rightmire, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: [email protected] DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22742 Published online 15 March 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
536
G. P. RIGHTMIRE
From upstate New York, Bill and Ruth traveled by way of Kansas to the desert southwest, where Bill accepted a professorship at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Here he would spend the balance of his long career, serving as head of the Department of Anthropology (1980–1989) and becoming involved with programs in community medicine, public health, and cancer as well as nutritional sciences. In the early 1980s, Bill along with his Arizona colleagues and graduate students began a longitudinal study of bone mineral density, body mass and composition, and health of populations at Sun City and in Tucson. These studies grew to include over 5,000 mainly female (but also male) subjects, many beyond the age of 60 years. Over the next couple of decades, the Arizona research on aging fueled a stream of reports and articles. In 1994, Stini, Chen, and Stein writing in the American Journal of Human Biology found that remodeling of the radial shaft results in a decrease in percentage cortical area (PCA) that is more pronounced in women than in men. Women begin to lose bone density earlier than men, and also lose it more rapidly. The remodeling process in females seems to be fundamentally different than that occurring in males, with greater expansion of the medullary cavity being the salient characteristic of females. Also, a positive relationship between PCA and body mass index (BMI) is present in women, but this correlation is (much) weaker for men. This pattern suggests more vigorous subperiosteal apposition in women with higher BMIs, and for these subjects, such apposition must play a major role in maintaining cortical bone density. In a 1998 paper in Collegium Antropologicum, Bill went on to interpret the Arizona bone density and BMI results in the light of calcium metabolism, maintenance of calcium homeostasis, and the possibility that chronic conditions such as (postmenopausal) osteoporosis represent “antagonistic pleiotropies.” In women after menopause, loss of calcium without replacement is the norm. The mechanisms that allow a woman to mature, bear children, and nurture them are instrumental in the uncompensated loss of bone mineral that increases the risk of fractures following the reproductive span. Such traumatic events occurring late in life have little selective significance, and indeed genetic traits (pleiotropies) conferring an advantage during the reproductive period but having a deleterious effect later in the life cycle (hence anatagonistic) can be expected to remain in the gene pool. Osteoporosis is likely an example of a trait that will constitute a major concern for health care delivery systems of the future.
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
On subsequent occasions, Bill returned to the topics of vitamin D synthesis, calcium metabolism, sex differences in bone loss, and differential fracture incidence. In 2003, he reported in Collegium Antropologicum that males as well as females in the Arizona study exhibit a decline in bone density with aging. It was clear that advancing osteoporosis is not a problem for women only. However, lower average bone densities characteristic of women throughout early adulthood, coupled with accelerated bone loss at menopause, make them susceptible to fractures at an earlier age than men. Thin patients are at high risk in all age categories. But the positive association of PCA with BMI in women, and a close relationship between higher BMI values and survival in the oldest patients, can reasonably be interpreted as evidence for the increased importance of amino acid reserves in old age. Most elderly subjects experience trauma in one form or another, often requiring surgery. Protein reserves as reflected in BMI probably play an important role in individual patient outcomes. Apart from the research based in Sun City and Tucson, Bill traveled several times to India to explore questions relating to body composition and aging in rural women, and to Saudi Arabia to conduct bone density studies. He was most enthusiastic about his two terms as a fellow of Linacre College at Oxford in 1985. Despite a busy schedule of research and speaking, he found the time to consult with the National Cancer Institute and join a subcommittee of the Arizona Governor’s Advisory Council on Aging. In 1978–1982, he served as physical anthropology editor for the American Anthropologist, and with this experience under his belt, he took on the job of editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1983–1989). Bill’s dedication to the AAPA was widely recognized by its members, who elected him first to the executive committee (1978–1981) and later to a term as president (1989–1991). Bill’s journey from Oshkosh to Ithaca, Lawrence, and Tucson is remarkable in many ways. He was driven to embrace the highest professional aspirations, and he succeeded in making his mark as professor of anthropology and as professor of family and community medicine at a first rank research university. His many academic accomplishments speak to an intellectual curiosity and an ability to focus on the tasks at hand, including, in the last decade of his life, providing his oncologist with the latest information bearing on treatments for leukemia. Bill was also a loyal friend, highly principled and fun. He had an especially well honed sense of humor, as all who knew him will gratefully remember.
Obituary: William A. Stini (1930–2014) G. Philip Rightmire* Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138
Dr. William A. Stini died on June 22, 2014, after battling cancer. Bill, as he was widely known, was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1930, went through school there, and was soon married to Ruth Kalous, who would be his companion and trusted confidant for 64 years. They had three daughters. Bill earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1960. He briefly pursued a career in the paper industry with Kimberly-Clark but found this routine unsatisfying. He and Ruth then made the important decision to return to the University of Wisconsin, where Bill would get further training in the life sciences. When I arrived in Madison in the fall of 1964, Bill and his young family were already in residence. Bill was a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, studying with William S. Laughlin and Richard H. Osborne. We were both intrigued by the new and (at the time) quite innovative program in Human Biology, offering an interdisciplinary route to the PhD. Students in biological anthropology, zoology, anatomy, medical genetics, or related fields were encouraged to participate. Bill and I were given support under a National Institute for Dental Research Training Grant, and we spent the next few years rushing from seminars in anthropology to the zoology laboratories, the medical school, and back again. I remember one long semester doing comparative anatomy, where we encouraged one another in the lab and shared observations as we picked and sliced our way through the sharks, frogs, colorfully perfused cats, and other creatures that had given their bodies, willingly or not, to the pursuit of science. It was hard work but worth the effort. When it was time to plan a program of research, Bill focused on nutrition, health, and disease in human populations. In 1967 and 1968, with support from the training grant, he arranged to carry out field work in Heliconia, located in the Cordillera Central of the Columbian Andes. The project involved gathering anthropometrics, conducting serological tests, and studying hand-wrist X-rays from children and adult subjects. Most of the Heliconia residents were living in a continual state of malnutrition, and some had kwashiorkor and marasmus. Bill was particularly interested in the effects of protein deficiency on skeletal maturation of apparently healthy boys and girls. He found that skeletal maturation was delayed in the Heliconia children compared to US standards. Females appeared to experience a form of catch-up growth beginning in the preadolescent period, while males were more severely affected throughout early life. As a result, there was a reduction in stature most pronounced in boys and a concomitant reduction in sexual dimorphism for overall body size. Bill offered a synthesis of these results in his UW doctoral dissertation, presented in 1969.
Ó 2015 WILEY PERIODICALS, INC.
After Wisconsin, Bill and Ruth moved to the shores of Lake Cayuga in upstate New York, where Bill was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. During his years at Cornell, Bill continued to develop his interests in the role of nutrition in human evolution, publishing articles in mainstream journals and giving numerous lectures to professional societies. In a 1971 article in American Anthropologist, Bill drew on his Heliconia observations, suggesting that a striking aspect of human adaptation to nutritional deficiency is a general miniaturization of both sexes, without loss of proportionality. Such a response should be adaptive, and Bill hypothesized that the reduction in body size seen in tropical agricultural populations across the world is likely an example of evolution in process. Since the beginning of the Neolithic, a reliance on agriculture coupled with reduced animal protein intake and increased disease exposure tied to urbanization have tended to create a niche in which large size is maladaptive. As a consequence, the limits of human developmental plasticity have been tested, with an accompanying high cost in infant and child mortalities. *Correspondence to: G. Philip Rightmire, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: [email protected] DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22742 Published online 15 March 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
536
G. P. RIGHTMIRE
From upstate New York, Bill and Ruth traveled by way of Kansas to the desert southwest, where Bill accepted a professorship at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Here he would spend the balance of his long career, serving as head of the Department of Anthropology (1980–1989) and becoming involved with programs in community medicine, public health, and cancer as well as nutritional sciences. In the early 1980s, Bill along with his Arizona colleagues and graduate students began a longitudinal study of bone mineral density, body mass and composition, and health of populations at Sun City and in Tucson. These studies grew to include over 5,000 mainly female (but also male) subjects, many beyond the age of 60 years. Over the next couple of decades, the Arizona research on aging fueled a stream of reports and articles. In 1994, Stini, Chen, and Stein writing in the American Journal of Human Biology found that remodeling of the radial shaft results in a decrease in percentage cortical area (PCA) that is more pronounced in women than in men. Women begin to lose bone density earlier than men, and also lose it more rapidly. The remodeling process in females seems to be fundamentally different than that occurring in males, with greater expansion of the medullary cavity being the salient characteristic of females. Also, a positive relationship between PCA and body mass index (BMI) is present in women, but this correlation is (much) weaker for men. This pattern suggests more vigorous subperiosteal apposition in women with higher BMIs, and for these subjects, such apposition must play a major role in maintaining cortical bone density. In a 1998 paper in Collegium Antropologicum, Bill went on to interpret the Arizona bone density and BMI results in the light of calcium metabolism, maintenance of calcium homeostasis, and the possibility that chronic conditions such as (postmenopausal) osteoporosis represent “antagonistic pleiotropies.” In women after menopause, loss of calcium without replacement is the norm. The mechanisms that allow a woman to mature, bear children, and nurture them are instrumental in the uncompensated loss of bone mineral that increases the risk of fractures following the reproductive span. Such traumatic events occurring late in life have little selective significance, and indeed genetic traits (pleiotropies) conferring an advantage during the reproductive period but having a deleterious effect later in the life cycle (hence anatagonistic) can be expected to remain in the gene pool. Osteoporosis is likely an example of a trait that will constitute a major concern for health care delivery systems of the future.
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
On subsequent occasions, Bill returned to the topics of vitamin D synthesis, calcium metabolism, sex differences in bone loss, and differential fracture incidence. In 2003, he reported in Collegium Antropologicum that males as well as females in the Arizona study exhibit a decline in bone density with aging. It was clear that advancing osteoporosis is not a problem for women only. However, lower average bone densities characteristic of women throughout early adulthood, coupled with accelerated bone loss at menopause, make them susceptible to fractures at an earlier age than men. Thin patients are at high risk in all age categories. But the positive association of PCA with BMI in women, and a close relationship between higher BMI values and survival in the oldest patients, can reasonably be interpreted as evidence for the increased importance of amino acid reserves in old age. Most elderly subjects experience trauma in one form or another, often requiring surgery. Protein reserves as reflected in BMI probably play an important role in individual patient outcomes. Apart from the research based in Sun City and Tucson, Bill traveled several times to India to explore questions relating to body composition and aging in rural women, and to Saudi Arabia to conduct bone density studies. He was most enthusiastic about his two terms as a fellow of Linacre College at Oxford in 1985. Despite a busy schedule of research and speaking, he found the time to consult with the National Cancer Institute and join a subcommittee of the Arizona Governor’s Advisory Council on Aging. In 1978–1982, he served as physical anthropology editor for the American Anthropologist, and with this experience under his belt, he took on the job of editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1983–1989). Bill’s dedication to the AAPA was widely recognized by its members, who elected him first to the executive committee (1978–1981) and later to a term as president (1989–1991). Bill’s journey from Oshkosh to Ithaca, Lawrence, and Tucson is remarkable in many ways. He was driven to embrace the highest professional aspirations, and he succeeded in making his mark as professor of anthropology and as professor of family and community medicine at a first rank research university. His many academic accomplishments speak to an intellectual curiosity and an ability to focus on the tasks at hand, including, in the last decade of his life, providing his oncologist with the latest information bearing on treatments for leukemia. Bill was also a loyal friend, highly principled and fun. He had an especially well honed sense of humor, as all who knew him will gratefully remember.
