see also the lancet p 106 jan 14. 1978
columbia like many other places is known for sucking money putting nsmes on things and often little more
ej ratner had the means to theend of als
rememeber him by taking his observation of alspstients firward to use
from afriend of his who watches as many needlessly suffer
perhaps rowland new mark altschule md who witnessed the operation in boston on mrs j edward spike jr described in the lsncet supra
Columbia still cannot treat caysalgia
Dr. Lewis P. Rowland, a neurologist who made fundamental discoveries in nerve and muscle diseases and clashed with government investigators during the McCarthy era, died on March 16 in Manhattan. He was 91.
The cause was a stroke, his son Steven said. Dr. Rowland, the chairman of Columbia University’s neurology department for 25 years, died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.
Dr. Rowland was a prolific researcher and writer, with nearly 500 published scientific articles that focused on devastating neuromuscular diseases, including muscular dystrophy, myasthenia gravis and many rare syndromes.
He took a special interest in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes degeneration of nerves in the brain and spinal cord, leading to weakness, paralysis and death.
Dr. Rowland led research teams that delineated a number of uncommon diseases that had been poorly understood. They also found that in a subgroup of A.L.S. patients, the disease was linked to lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.
Other studies led to the discovery that a gene defect causes an unusual form of dementia in some patients with A.L.S. In myasthenia gravis, Dr. Rowland and his colleagues documented its high death rate and helped identify treatments that prolonged survival.
In the 1970s, long before the tools existed to study DNA’s role in neurological diseases like A.L.S., Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, Dr. Rowland predicted correctly that genetics would be the key to understanding them.
One of his accomplishments at Columbia was the expansion in 1982 of an intensive care unit that added beds for patients who were severely ill with neurological disorders. Before then, it was often difficult to find I.C.U. space for them.
“Most of these patients would be left to sort of wither away, having lots of trouble breathing,” said Dr. Richard Mayeux, the current chairman of neurology at Columbia. “He really made it a multidisciplinary clinic where people would get seen by nutritionists, physical therapists and respiratory therapists. It’s pretty much the standard now.”
Dr. Rowland founded a center at Columbia for research and treatment of A.L.S. and helped to found a center for muscular dystrophy.
Dr. Mayeux described him as a “wonderful, innovative mentor,” with many trainees who went on to lead neurology departments themselves.
He was born Lewis Phillip Rosenthal in Brooklyn on Aug. 3, 1925, to Henry A. Rosenthal, who owned a fabric business, and the former Cecile Coles. He had one sibling, a younger brother, Theodore.
The family was Jewish, and Henry Rosenthal changed its surname when Lewis was in his teens because Ivy League colleges had quotas for Jews and he did not want a Jewish name to hurt his sons’ chances of admission. Lewis went to Yale, for undergraduate studies and medical school, which he completed in 1948. Theodore went to Harvard and became an economist.
In 1943, during World War II, Lewis joined the Navy, which paid for his medical education in exchange for his military service. In medical school, he became the national president of the Association of Interns and Medical Students, or AIMS, which advocated universal health insurance, equal medical care for rich and poor, and more admissions of minorities to medical school.
In New York, in 1952, at a fund-raising party for national health insurance, he met Esther Edelman, a graduate student in political science. They married three months later.
In 1953, they moved to Bethesda, Md., so that Dr. Rowland could perform his government service by working at the National Institutes of Health. But McCarthyism was in full swing, and soon, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation sought to question him about his involvement with AIMS, which was suspected of Communist leanings.
Dr. Rowland refused to be interrogated, and he was fired from the N.I.H.
“He stood up to the people who were persecuting us,” Mrs. Rowland said in an interview.
“He thought he was never going to be able to work again,” she added. "There were other scientists who were thrown out and did not get jobs.”
But within a few months he was hired by the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. In 1957, he went back to Columbia, and in 1967 he was named chairman of the neurology department at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He returned to Columbia in 1973 to be the chairman of neurology, a position he held until his retirement in 1998.
While at Columbia he also served as president of the American Neurological Association and the American Academy of Neurology, and edited the leading journal in neurology as well as seven editions of a major textbook on the subject, writing large portions of it.
In addition to his wife, brother and son Steven, Dr. Rowland is survived by a daughter, Joy Rosenthal; another son, Andrew; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
A grandson, Cameron Rowland, is an artist whose work is currently in shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
After retiring, Dr. Rowland kept attending weekly “muscle rounds” in Columbia’s neurology department, an activity he had started in which senior doctors and trainees would examine a patient together, for teaching purposes. He attended those rounds on the day he had his stroke, and he died a week later in the neurological intensive care unit that he had created.
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