10s

top

Professor Gustav Born obituary

Professor Gustav Born obituary The Times, April 27 2018

Olivia had this to say on her Facebook page, 28 April 2018 “This is the obituary of my favorite uncle Gustav Born - my mother’s brother. He was a kind, humble, sweet and thoughtful man who was recognized for his huge contribution to medicine through his work with platelets. I am proud to be his niece and to read all the beautiful comments from strangers whose lives he touched. I will miss him very much. xox Olivia”

Professor Gustav Born obituary

Doctor who played a key role in developing drugs used to prevent heart attacks and strokes after witnessing the horrors of Hiroshima

A lifetime afterwards Gustav Born said “the shadow of Hiroshima” was still with him. “In the rubble people stood at the roadside, desperate, thin and starving, and very quiet,” he recalled in old age. “Thousands were still dying from the effects of radiation.”

Barely out of medical school, he was one of two British army doctors sent to the city after VJ day, but there was nothing he could do. The survivors’ bone marrow had been destroyed by radiation, and they could no longer make the platelets that helped their blood to clot. They were bleeding relentlessly.

“It was a vision you could never forget,” he said. In rare moments of rest from his work as part of the occupying force, he would look across the inland sea to a 16th-century Shinto peace shrine. “I was struck by the contrast . . . the thousands of people dying three or four months after the bomb, with no food and medicine.”

Yet if the shadow of this period did indeed follow him, its effects were not all bleak. From the charred and irradiated rubble of Hiroshima would come his greatest achievement, one that would itself save thousands of lives.

Born remembered what he saw in those radiation victims without platelets. When he returned to Britain and resumed his studies at Oxford he decided to find out their function. So began one of the great biomedical research careers of the 20th century. Born’s work led, among many things, to better heart and lung bypass machines, to an understanding of how aspirin works and to the development of antiplatelet drugs, which are used to prevent heart attacks and strokes.

Gustav Victor Rudolf Born was born in Germany in 1921. His father, Max, was a theoretical physicist who would later win the Nobel Prize, and whose friends — Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac and Pauli, among others — would regularly visit their home. His mother, Hedwig, was a published poet who, he remembered, would lie in bed writing letters and poems. “She was a great friend of Einstein’s, he was very fond of women,” Born said.

With a mother in bed and a father contemplating the mysteries of the subatomic world, childcare for Born and his two elder sisters, Irene and Gritli, was delegated to the daughters of a Lutheran pastor. They were, he recalled, loving and good fun. In this environment he grew up having only the haziest understanding of his Jewish heritage. This changed with the rise of the Nazis. Suddenly identity mattered. “At secondary school there was an attack on the one clearly Jewish boy in the year,” he said. “I took one of these kids who was much bigger than me and threw him out of the window.”

But they could not fight their way out of fascism. In 1933 Hitler, newly installed as chancellor, signed a document dismissing Max from his chair at Göttingen University. The family sought the advice of Einstein, who had been friends with Max since 1916 and had already left the country. It was in their correspondence, discussing the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, that Einstein used his famous (and erroneous) argument, “God does not play dice.” However, Einstein was unequivocal over the more worldly concern: they should leave. Ernest Rutherford, the British scientist regarded as the father of nuclear physics, invited the family to Cambridge. They took up the offer. Here childhood resumed and Gustav’s education continued at the Perse School. Despite his father’s occasional efforts, and the regular visits from Nobel prizewinning physicists the young man did not show promise as a mathematician — at least against the standards of one of the finest mathematicians in the world. His father’s attempts to teach him “proper maths” failed.

When war broke out Born took Max’s pragmatic advice to study medicine. “He said to me, ‘a) You don’t have to kill anyone, b) You are less likely to be killed.’ ” That was how he came to be in Hiroshima.

Amid the devastation, the irony did not escape him that he was dealing with the literal fallout of a weapon created by his father’s PhD student Robert Oppenheimer. Equally he could take some comfort that Max, who referred to nuclear weapons as a “devilish invention”, had almost certainly turned down an invitation to work at Los Alamos on their development.

Returning to Britain after demobilisation, Born began research at Oxford under Howard Florey, who had made his name working with Fleming on the development of penicillin. Together they turned their attention to platelets.

Most of the time, platelets are smooth discs that flow in your blood unnoticed, not impeding the travel of the red blood cells that provide oxygen. When a blood vessel gets cut, however, the platelets undergo a rapid change, becoming tangly and sticky. They adhere to the abrasion, block it, and send out chemical messages inducing the same change in surrounding platelets. Much of the intricacies of this process, in particular the feedback loop in which a small clot induces a larger one, were unknown at the time.

The first step in uncovering these details began with an invention by Born which, for all of its effect on the field, he always dismissed as “very banal”. This invention, called the aggregometer, was a means of measuring the proportion of platelets that had formed into clots. When blood is put through a centrifuge the platelets can be separated from the blood cells and studied.

The resulting suspension is a milky liquid but as the platelets join together and clot it becomes clearer. This means that by shining a light and measuring how much gets through you can track the speed of clotting. It is a simple idea but Born’s aggregometer was revolutionary: it meant that you could study platelets en masse. The aggregometer was soon found in laboratories around the world. However, Born never profited from his invention. “I was often asked, ‘Why didn’t you patent it?’ ” Born said. The truth is it never occurred to him. “Florey said, ‘You don’t patent anything in medicine, you shouldn’t.’ I’d have been a rich man if I had.”

By this stage, in 1961, Born had just gone through a divorce with his first wife, Ann (nee Plowden-Wardlaw), who was a doctor, after 11 years of marriage. They had three children: Max, Georgina and Sebastian. A year later he married Faith Maurice-Williams, a GP with whom he would have two children, Matt and Carey, and spend the rest of his life. She survives him.

Throughout this period, his research continued to make progress despite the turbulence in his personal life. Using the aggregometer he teased apart the feedback loop by which platelets induced their neighbours to clot. He also helped to show that aspirin and other drugs interfered with it. The absence of functioning platelets was fatal for the radiation victims he saw at the start of his career, but for other patients the reverse was true. In people at risk of heart attacks and strokes, stopping the clots that can block arteries can save lives. This is particularly true when using bypass machines to perform heart surgery.

Over a career that lasted into almost his tenth decade, Born continued to investigate the physiology of blood. He moved to Cambridge, where he was professor of pharmacology, then to King’s College London. Finally, in the late 1980s, he had what would be his last, and longest, academic posting, at the William Harvey Institute, which later became part of Queen Mary, University of London.

Younger colleagues from this time would recall entering the cornucopia that was his office, where a lifetime of mementoes were on display, beginning with the photograph of him as a boy sitting on Albert Einstein’s knee. They would also recall a gentle man, generous with his time, who was both interesting and interested.

His children went on to success in their own fields. Max, the eldest, is a musician while his brother Sebastian was the literary director at the National Theatre. Their sister Georgina was a member of the 1970s avant-rock group Henry Cow before becoming a respected musicologist. Of the two children from his second marriage, Carey is a film-maker and Matt is a former journalist on The Daily Telegraph who runs a TV company. None has yet achieved the fame of their cousin, and Born’s niece, the actress Olivia Newton-John.

Born would joke that all his life he was known as the son of a famous scientist, then he found he was the uncle of a famous film star. Even for a man known for his self-deprecation, this casual dismissal of an astonishing life and career was a deprecation too far.

Professor Gustav Born FRS, was born on July 29, 1921. He died on April 16, 2018, aged 96

Some Reader Comments:

An interesting obituary but for one glaring mistake, Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, is on the New Zealand 100 dollar bill for a reason. He was from New Zealand.

Proof once again that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

An outstandingly well written (well done, Mr Whipple!) obituary of a truly talented and remarkable person. Nazi Germany’s loss was as ever humanity’s gain.Thank you.

Desperate, and thin and starving, and very quiet. A perfect description of a prisoner of war of the Japanese.

Thank you. Ever since I met him at his office at the Cambridge MRC molecular biology building in 1975, at an interview for something called a Tancred Scholarship, I have wanted to know more about him and his work. He was one of the few people I ever met in the medical world who left a deep impression, an aura of humble greatness. I now wish that I had been interviewing him and not vice versa.

RIP - this man helped millions, including me - thank you!