Donald Berthold Zilversmit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Zilversmit

Donald Berthold Zilversmit (1919–2010) was a Dutch-born U.S. nutritional biochemist, researcher and educator. He spent much of his career at Cornell University as Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences.[1]

Zilversmit was born in Hengelo, Netherlands, the son of Herman and Elizabeth (DeWinter) Zilversmit. He began studies at Utrecht University but escaped before the German invasion in World War II. He came to the United States in 1939 to finish his studies at the University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1940, Ph.D. 1948).[1] He joined a Dutch brigade during the war.[2]

He married Kitty Fonteyn in 1945. She wrote of her time in hiding and their separation during the Nazi occupation in Yours Always, A Holocaust Love Story. They have three daughters.[2]

He was on the faculty of the University of Tennessee Medical College from 1948 to 1966. He received a Career Investigator Award from the American Heart Association in 1959. Zilversmit joined the faculty of Cornell's Graduate School of Nutrition in 1966 and remained until retirement in 1990.[1][3]

He was awarded an honorary degree from Utrecht University in 1980 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989.[1]

Zilversmit authored or co-authored over 300 publications and made major contributions to the understanding of the relationship between diet and cardiovascular disease. He greatly contributed to the understanding of atherogenesis, including basic mechanisms in lipid transport and exchange. He also pioneered the development of mathematical analysis for the interpretation of kinetic data.[1] He co-founded the Journal of Lipid Research.[4]

He died on September 16, 2010 in Canton, Mass.[3]

In Memorium - http://www.jlr.org/content/early/2011/05/17/jlr.E017251.full.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3111741/

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=1457...

ZILVERSMIT, Donald Berthold Died peacefully at the age of 91 on September 16, 2010 surrounded by his three daughters. He was preceded in death by his wife of 63 years, Kitty in May of 2009. Together they spent the last ten years at Orchard Cove; a retirement community in Canton Massachusetts. Zilversmit was born in Hengelo Netherlands, the son of Herman and Elizabeth (DeWinter) Zilversmit. He began his studies at Utrecht University in Utrecht Holland but left Holland just prior to the invasion by the Germans during World War II. He came to the United States in 1939 to finish his studies at the University of California, Berkeley but was preoccupied by the war in his home country and lonely for his fiancee, Kitty who remained in Holland. As a result he joined the Dutch Canadian Army and became a medic in 1940. Following his service in the Army he was reunited with Kitty and they were married in Amsterdam on June 28, 1945. They started their life together in Oakland California where Zilversmit was able to finish his studies in Berkeley (B.S., 1940 PhD. 1948). He joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee Medical College in Memphis in 1947 where he remained until 1966. Dr. Zilversmit had a brilliant scientific career and was recognized worldwide for his contributions in understanding the relationship between diet and cardiovascular disease. He greatly contributed to the understanding of atherogenesis, including basic mechanisms in lipid transport and exchange. Zilversmit joined the faculty at Cornell University in Ithaca NY in 1966 and remained until retirement in 1990 at the age of 70. Among his many honors, he was awarded the prestigious Career Investigator Award from the American Heart Association in 1959 allowing him to continue with his research and academic study for life. He was Professor Emeritus in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell and received an honorary degree from Utrecht University in 1980. In 1989 Zilversmit was elected to the National Academy of Science. He has written over 300 publications. Dr. Zilversmit will be remembered by those who knew him for his strong love of learning and commitment and dedication to his research. He is survived by his three daughters, Lee Karrow of Oak Park Il, Sue Howard of Scarborough ME and Jo Feldman of Canton, MA, his brother and sister-in-law Bert and Ellen Zilversmit of Brentwood CA, five grandchildren and 2 great-grand children. The family intends to have a private memorial service for Dr. Zilversmit this summer in Ithaca New York. In lieu of flowers contributions can be made in his name to the American Heart Association . Stanetsky Memorial Chapel 781-821-4600 www.stanetsky.com

Published in The Boston Globe on Oct. 3, 2010 - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=1457...

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/142/2/211

Cornell Professor Emeritus Donald B. Zilversmit died peacefully at age 91 on September 16, 2010 at Orchard Cove, a retirement community in Canton, MA, surrounded by his three daughters. Don had an outstanding and highly productive career at Cornell University both as a researcher and a teacher. His research on atherosclerosis and lipid transport led to several seminal discoveries that spanned 5 decades.

Don was born in Hengelo, The Netherlands on July 11, 1911. He began his studies at Utrecht University, but he and his Jewish family left Holland in 1939, just before the German invasion of Holland during World War II. This was a very difficult decision for Don because he was already engaged to his sweetheart, Kitty Fonteyn. The Zilversmit family came to California where an uncle had already immigrated. Don decided to pursue studies toward a B.S. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. For his Ph.D. studies, he accepted an assistantship in the Department of Physiology in the laboratory of I. L. Chaikoff at Berkeley. In May of 1940, Nazi armies began the invasion of The Netherlands. Concerned with the war in Holland and missing his fiancée, Don joined the Dutch Canadian Army, Princess Irene Brigade, as an ambulance driver. He had been turned down by the U.S. Army, because he was not yet a U.S. citizen. For the length of the war, Kitty worked as a nurse, being hidden in various hospitals and nursing homes with the help of the Dutch underground resistance movement. Don and Kitty were reunited in Holland four days after the war ended, and they were married in 1945. Kitty published a book entitled Yours Always, A Holocaust Love Story that described her wartime experiences and her enduring relationship with Don. All of Kitty’s immediate family disappeared during the war except for her brother, Leo.

After the war, Don completed his graduate studies at Berkeley where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1948. During that time, he published his first studies, described below, on the use of radioisotopes to trace lipid metabolism. He joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee Medical College in Memphis in 1947 and remained there until 1966, when he joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Nutrition (now Division of Nutritional Sciences) at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

As a Rosenberg Fellow at the University of California in Dr. Chaikoff’s laboratory, Don became interested in phospholipid metabolism and pioneered the use of radioisotopes in these studies (1, 2). In those days, purified isotopes were not yet commercially available and needed to be purified from a mixture of isotopes prepared in the university’s reactor. The effect of radiation on tissues was not yet fully appreciated. One of us (A.B.) remembers Don describing crossing the Berkeley campus carrying buckets of radioactive materials. The work on phospholipid turnover was followed by several reports on the mathematical basis of tracer technology in the determination of metabolite turnover and precursor end-product relationships. These paradigms were used extensively both in the field of lipid metabolism and other biological science areas. Early in his scientific career, Don appreciated the importance of well-validated methodology for the progress of science. A considerable fraction of his laboratory projects were devoted to improving existing analytical methods or innovating new approaches when an obvious need for reliable methods existed. Of note, his laboratory developed methods for the microanalyses of fatty acids, TG, and phospholipids. The 1950s was a time when new methods were being developed for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of lipids, which were then considered messy heterogeneous substances to be avoided. The development of new methods of countercurrent chromatography, GC, and column chromatography allowed separations that previously could not be obtained and provided new insights to researchers in the lipid field. Don and other colleagues in the field recognized a growing need for a forum for better exchange of information. This led to the creation of a nonprofit organization, Lipid Research, Inc., whose goal was to publish the Journal of Lipid Research. From 1959 to 1961, Don Zilversmit served as the first Editor-in-Chief of this journal. A section in the Journal of Lipid Research from its inception, as it still is today, was devoted to “Notes on Methodology.”

While he was at the University of Tennessee, Don pursued his interest in phospholipid metabolism during lipid intestinal absorption and its impact on arterial plaque formation (3). Molecular aspects of lipid absorption were still controversial. Don’s work on the structure and metabolism of chylomicrons was seminal for the field (4). These interests continued after his move to Cornell where he concentrated his research on the effects of dietary cholesterol and TG on atherosclerosis. In 1973, he published in Circulation Research an often-quoted hypothesis on the role of arterial lipoprotein lipase and TG-rich lipoproteins in atheroma formation (5). His proposal on postprandial lipoproteinemia turned out to be correct, and clinical trials and epidemiological studies have shown that elevated plasma TG are a risk factor for atherosclerosis independently of LDL. The 70s were also the time when his laboratory reexamined methods for measuring cholesterol absorption and validated a simple dual-isotope technique (6). In the same period, his laboratory demonstrated that retinol esters remained associated with chylomicrons during their metabolism and could be used as a tracer to investigate the transport of these lipoproteins (7) and their atherogenic properties (8).

Starting in the late 1960s and until his retirement, Don initiated a new area of research in molecular aspects of lipid metabolism (9, 10). His laboratory discovered a new class of proteins responsible for the exchange of lipids between lipoproteins in plasma and between organelles within cells. This was a very exciting and highly productive time in his laboratory. Postdoctoral fellows and visiting fellows flocked from Europe and Asia to his laboratory. Several distinct lipid exchange proteins were purified and characterized from blood and other tissues. These proteins have a major impact on lipoprotein composition in the blood. The plasma cholesteryl ester transfer protein was first characterized in his laboratory (11). The microsomal TG transfer protein, also first isolated in his laboratory (12), was later demonstrated by one of his former postdoctoral fellows to be necessary for the biosynthesis of VLDL in the liver. This is of major importance, because VLDL is the precursor of LDL, the well-documented carrier of the cholesterol accumulating in atheromatous lesions. These and other phospholipid and cholesterol exchange proteins proved also to be very useful tools in the studies of phospholipid and cholesterol topology in membrane biology (13).

Don Zilversmit was a highly productive scientist. Along with his students and postdoctoral fellows, he published over 300 papers. His seminal contributions in the lipid field were recognized by many awards. In 1959, Don received a highly competitive award, a lifetime Career Development Award from the AHA, which he held for 40 years. In 1976, the AIN selected Don for the Borden Award, and the AHA selected him to give the prestigious George Lyman Duff Memorial Lecture at the association’s annual meetings. The University of Utrecht, where he began his academic studies, conferred to him an honorary doctoral degree in physical sciences in 1980. In 1989, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was selected for the Bristol-Myers Squibb/Mead Johnson Award for Distinguished Achievement in Nutrition Research in 1990.

Don Zilversmit had a passion for research. He set incredible high standards for himself, his students, and his technical staff. During all his years at Cornell, he led a journal club/lipid seminar with campus-wide participation where both faculty members and students reported on their own research and novel reports in the literature. This was a unique setting for students to learn to critically analyze research data and evaluate conclusions of authors. He was also active in a general student seminar in nutritional sciences where he instilled in students the need for critical thinking.

During his last few years at Cornell, Don became interested in the philosophy of science. He led an informal reading group on the subject. Don was a highly ethical individual as a scientist and in his private life. Of particular interest to him was the writing of scientific papers. He strongly felt that all data collected should be presented in the chronological order that they were obtained and not selectively rearrange to support the main conclusions of the paper.

This brief account of Don’s professional life would not be complete without mentioning the critical role of Don’s laboratory manager both at the university of Tennessee and Cornell, Barry Hughes. Barry was trained as a chemist and shared with Don high standards for well-designed experiments and well-validated methodology. Barry had excellent hands both as an analytical chemist and also as an experimental surgeon in dog, rat, and rabbit experiments. He played a critical role in the training of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. Barry is currently enjoying his retirement in Ithaca.

Don’s passion for science was enabled by the support and admiration of his wife and daughters, whose interests were in music, social work, and family life. His wife, Kitty, died in 2009; the Zilversmit’s are survived by three daughters, Sue Howard, Lee Karrow, and Jo Feldman, and four grandchildren.