In Memoriam

The study published in this issue (Daltroy et al., 2007) was the last one our colleague completed and a fitting acknowledgment of a wonderful personal and professional life. He was born to a family of creativity and leadership. His father was a war hero and a scientist at the renowned Bell Laboratory. His brother is a distinguished scholar of the Incas at Cornell. Born in Vancouver, Canada, he was named after Lawren Harris, one of the famous Group of Seven painters. Like many successful people, he stumbled onto his life’s work. As a European history major at the University of Michigan, he discovered the acoustic guitar and toyed seriously with being a professional musician had not someone suggested public health. The rest was history but he never traveled without lugging his practice guitar. I first met him recruiting for an education expert—a requirement of a National Institutes of Health review committee as a condition of funding. In retrospect, it was a gift, a condition I’ve never heard of before or since. We hardly knew what we were looking for but we advertised internationally and interviewed dozens of candidates. As luck would have it, Larry Greene was on sabbatical at Harvard. Our exploration ended when he recommended a bright grad of his Hopkins program. We invited Lawren to Boston in the dead of a harsh winter in 1982 and driving him to dinner in Cambridge, I realized that we were talking shorthand: The ideas and shared vision were coming faster than we could react. It was like the proverbial “love at first sight.” He accepted the job and began working on a knotty problem, a problem at that point with no funding. Perhaps neither one of us really knew what we had bitten off but were excited by the sheer challenge of it: to critically evaluate the concept of “Back Schools” in a reallife occupational setting, the U.S. Post Office, and to do it with an intervention that went beyond anything that was offered and informed by powerful theory. He stayed for 20 years and turned down bigger jobs and better pay several times. He and I were the only ones who were underpaid in a department-wide survey. Lawren was the associate director of the Robert B. Brigham Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases Clinical Research Center, its first and only, from 1983 to 2003. The Center had an enviable record of scholarship for more than 25 years. More than 45 trainees, many from overseas, spent their formative years in its nest, and most stayed in research of one sort or another, some attained academic distinction. Three died tragically in their prime. All were like extended family. The Center was the model for the National Institutes of Health initiative to develop programs for training clinical investigators.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.