Clarence Lushbaugh

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Clarence C. Lushbaugh , called Lush (born March 15, 1916 in Covington , Kentucky , † October 13, 2000 in Oak Ridge , Tennessee ) was an American radiologist and pathologist . He is considered one of the fathers of modern chemotherapy . Together with Leon Orris Jacobson , he researched the therapeutic possibilities of the substance “HN2” (nitrogen mustard, mechlorethamine ) in the treatment of cancer in the 1940s . Lushbaugh was also a world leader in radiation sickness .

biography

Lushbaugh's father died of the Spanish flu in 1918 . He has since grown up with his single mother. He was considered a hard-working, inquisitive and technically gifted student. Lushbough worked as a girl for everything on a tourist ranch in Colorado during the summer vacation .

After finishing school, he moved to the University of Chicago , where he began studying medicine. He did his PhD with a thesis on the "Influence of alcohol on rabbits' resistance to the pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae ". After graduating as a Ph.D. he stayed at the University of Chicago and became chief pathologist at the Institute of Toxicology. In particular, the effects of chemical warfare agents during the Second World War were examined there. In an experiment with HN2, he and his colleague Jacobson discovered the cytostatic effect of the substance. His idea of ​​using HN2 as a chemotherapeutic agent in the treatment of cancer initially met with little approval from hospital doctors. In the end he was still able to convince some hematologists of his idea. Lushbaugh realized that without a medical license he had little chance of translating basic scientific knowledge into clinical practice. So he resumed his medical studies and finally graduated as MD in 1948. During this time, Lushbaugh was the first to publish a medical publication on amniotic fluid embolism , a birth complication that had remained undiscovered by the medical community.

In 1949 Lushbaugh left Chicago for the Medical Center in Los Alamos , New Mexico . There he shifted his research focus to skin diseases caused by ionizing radiation doses. His specialty became the study of the associated biochemical changes in the skin. Numerous radiation victims from US nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s were among his patients. Lushbaugh has become an internationally recognized radiation sickness expert . Research trips took him to Brazil , El Salvador and even the Soviet Union . During his time in Los Alamos, he also developed a method by which the time of death of a corpse can be determined based on body temperature. In forensic pathology it is known as Algor mortis and is sometimes also cited as the Lushbaugh method .
In 1963, Lushbaugh divorced his first wife, Mary Helen, with whom he had sons William and Robert and daughter Nancy. In the same year he married again, left Los Alamos and went to the Oak Ridge Associated Universities in Tennessee as a senior scientist . From 1975 to 1984 he was dean of the medical faculty there. Numerous institutes of the faculty, such as the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center and the Center for Epidemiological Research (CER), were established under his direction. In 1990 he retired.

Lushbaugh was married to his second wife, Dorothy Bess, for 37 years until his death. He died at the age of 84 in 2000 from complications from Alzheimer's disease .

literature

personal data
SURNAME Lushbaugh, Clarence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lushbaugh, Clarence C .; Lush
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American radiologist and pathologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 15, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Covington , Kentucky
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 2000
Place of death Oak Ridge , Tennessee