Bernard Lown, Inventive Heart Doctor and Antiwar Activist, Dies at 99
He created the first effective heart defibrillator and co-founded a
physicians group that campaigned against nuclear war, earning a Nobel
Peace Prize.
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Dr. Bernard Lown in 2018 in his home at the time in Newton, Mass. He
developed a new method for correcting dangerously abnormal heart
rhythms. In another sphere he campaigned against the threat of nuclear war.
Dr. Bernard Lown in 2018 in his home at the time in Newton, Mass. He
developed a new method for correcting dangerously abnormal heart
rhythms. In another sphere he campaigned against the threat of nuclear
war.Credit...Katherine Taylor for The New York Times
ByRobert D. McFadden <https://www.nytimes.com/by/robert-d-mcfadden>
* NYT, Feb. 16, 2021
Dr. Bernard Lown, the Harvard cardiologist who invented the first
effective heart defibrillator and was one of a group of co-founders of
an international organization that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for
its campaign against nuclear war, died on Tuesday at his home in
Chestnut Hill, Mass. He was 99.
His granddaughter Ariel Lown Lewiton confirmed the death. She said he
had experienced complications of congestive heart failure and had
contracted pneumonia.
It was in 1962 that Dr. Lown, a pioneer in the research of sudden
cardiac death, developed a new method for correcting dangerously
abnormal heart rhythms, called fibrillations. At the time, they were
believed to be responsible for 40 percent of the half-million fatal
heart attacks in the United States every year. By administering a
precisely timed jolt of direct-current electricity, his defibrillator
was able to restore normal heartbeats.
The breakthrough, after decades of failed or flawed alternatives by
others, became a lifesaving technique worldwide and helped make
open-heart surgery possible. It ushered in a new era of cardiac
resuscitation techniques and technological developments, including
modern pacemakers and defibrillators implanted in the chests of heart
patients that automatically detect and correct abnormal rhythms.
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was plagued by coronary disease
and heart attacks for decades and had a sophisticated pacemaker and
defibrillator implanted in 2001, is perhaps the most prominent recipient
of these advances.
Dr. Lown’s antinuclear work was more controversial. In 1980, seven
American and Soviet physicians, including Dr. Lown andDr. Yevgeny I.
Chazov
<https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/40/28/2276/5536522?login=true>,
a Russian cardiologist and personal doctor to the Soviet leader Leonid
I. Brezhnev, founded International Physicians for the Prevention of
Nuclear War. Campaigning against nuclear testing and the arms race, the
group had gathered 135,000 members in 41 countries by 1985,when it won
the peace prize
<https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/12/world/nobel-peace-prize-given-to-doctors-opposed-to-war.html>.
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ImageDr. Lown, second from right, with his American and Soviet
colleagues after their group, International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War, received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. Lown, second from right, with his American and Soviet colleagues
after their group, International Physicians for the Prevention of
Nuclear War, received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.Credit...International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
“This organization has performed a considerable service to mankind by
spreading authoritative information and by creating a public awareness
of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare,” the NorwegianNobel
Committee
<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1985/physicians/facts/>said in
awarding the prize. Dr. Lown and Dr. Chazov, who shared the group’s
presidency, received the prize in Oslo on behalf of the organization.
The other founders wereHerbert L. Abrams
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/science/herbert-abrams-worked-against-nuclear-war.html>,Eric
Chivian
<https://www.rsc.org/images/chivian_chemistryworldjul09_tcm18-155906.pdf>andJames
E.
Muller<https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/health/a-conversation-with-james-muller-doctor-for-peace-gains-power-for-laity.html>of
the Harvard Medical School, and Mikhail Kuzin and Leonid Ilyin of the
Soviet Union.
While the organization insisted that it had no tilt toward Moscow or
Washington and that it regarded atomic war as the ultimate public health
disaster that would overwhelm modern medicine, conservative Western
critics called its leaders naïve, maintaining that its work played into
the hands of Soviet propagandists.
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The award was particularly controversial
<https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/15/weekinreview/the-world-war-erupts-over-the-peace-prize.html>because
Dr. Chazov, a member of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee,
was the personal physician to Kremlin leaders and had, a decade earlier,
spoken out against the only other Soviet recipient of the Nobel Peace
Prize,Andrei D. Sakharov
<https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/obituaries/andrei-sakharov-68-nuclear-inventor-and-mainspring-of-the-soviet-conscience.html>,
the human rights activist who as a physicist had been instrumental in
developing the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb.
In a 2008 memoir, “Prescription for Survival: A Doctor’s Journey to End
Nuclear Madness,” Dr. Lown recounted the story of his antinuclear group
and noted that the end of the Cold War had not resolved the threat of
annihilation. “Eliminating the nuclear menace,” he wrote, “is a historic
challenge questioning whether we humans have a future on planet earth.”
Bernard Lown was born in Utena, Lithuania, on June 7, 1921, to Nisson
and Bella (Grossbard) Lown. A grandfather of his had been a rabbi in
Lithuania.
The family emigrated to Maine in 1935, and his father ran a shoe factory
there, in Pittsfield. Bernard graduated from Lewiston High School in
1938. He earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology at the University of
Maine in 1942 and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1945.
In 1946, he married Louise Lown, a cousin.She died in 2019.
<https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?n=louise-lown&pid=194531599&fhid=8784>The
couple had previously lived in Newton, Mass. In addition to his
granddaughter Ariel, he is survived by three children, Anne, Fredric and
Naomi Lown; four other grandchildren; and one great-grandchild
After an internship and residency in New York City, Dr. Lown settled in
Boston in 1950 and over the next decade taught and conducted
cardiovascular research at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Harvard
Medical School.
In 1952, he and Dr. Samuel A. Levine recommended inThe Journal of the
American Medical Association
<https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/314521>that
patients with congestive heart disease recuperate in an armchair, not a
bed, because fluids pool in the chest cavity when lying down, forcing
the heart to work harder. The advice is widely accepted now.
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After hearing a lecture on medicine and nuclear war, Dr. Lown became the
founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1961. In
1962, he studied the medical effects of a hypothetical nuclear attack on
Boston. His conclusions — that the attack on one city would exhaust all
the nation’s medical resources just to treat the burn victims — were
published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Lown disclosed his breakthrough experiments on defibrillation in
1962 in a report to the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
Previous arrhythmia work had shown that a heartbeat’s cycle contained
two points of vulnerability, each lasting only a few thousandths of a
second, and that jolts of alternating current to correct irregularities
were too imprecise to avoid them and often proved fatal.
The Lown device, called a cardioverter, used direct current and precise
timing to avoid the danger points. He administered jolts through the
chest walls of 11 patients, some near death, and restored normal
heartbeats to all. He had the device manufactured by the American
Optical Company, and by 1964 thousands of hospitals were equipped with
it and routinely restoring wildly erratic heartbeats to normal patterns.
Dr. Lown’s later research found that the trigger for many abnormal heart
rhythms was not in the heart but in the brain and central nervous
system, and that everyday stress played a role. In 1973, he reported
that sleep was better than many potent cardiac drugs in controlling
dangerous heartbeats,and in 1976
<https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/01/archives/westchester-weekly-laughing-gas-eases-coronary-pain-laughing-gas-is.html>he
found that nitrous oxide — old-fashioned “laughing gas” — could relieve
the acute pain of heart attacks.
Dr. Lown founded SatelLife USA, a nonprofit based in Boston that
launched a communications satellite in 1991 to help provide online
medical training and information to thousands of doctors and health care
workers in Africa and Asia.
He also founded ProCor, a global email and web network focusing on
cardiovascular crises in developing nations, where up-to-date medical
information can be scarce. Both organizations have been credited with
saving lives in emergencies.
Dr. Lown was the author of several books besides his memoir, including
“The Lost Art of Healing” (1996), and more than 400 research articles in
medical journals. He lectured widely and was the recipient of many
honors, including UNESCO’s Peace Education Prize.
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He retired from the Harvard School of Public Health as professor
emeritus in 2000 but remained a senior physician at Brigham and Women’s
Hospital in Boston. He continued to direct the Lown Cardiovascular
Center in Brookline, Mass., which emphasizes noninvasive and preventive
treatments, as well as a foundation that supports cardiovascular
research and training.
In 2018, Dr. Rich Joseph, a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s
Hospital, treated Dr. Lown for pneumonia and got to know his patient
afterward. Dr. Josephwrote a commentary
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/opinion/sunday/doctors-revolt-bernard-lown.html>for
The New York Times about Dr. Lown’s appeal, in “The Lost Art of
Healing,” for a restoration of trust between doctors and patients.
“Despite his reputation, Dr. Lown was treated like just another widget
on the hospital’s conveyor belt,” Dr. Joseph wrote, and he quoted Dr.
Lown as saying: “Each day, one person on the medical team would say one
thing in the morning, and by afternoon the plan was changed. I always
was the last to know what exactly was going on, and my opinion hardly
mattered.”
Dr. Lown needed “the feeling of being a major partner in this decision,”
he said, adding: “Even though I’m a doctor, I am still a human with
anxieties.”
Isabella Paoletto contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the
winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The
Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books.
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