A Notable 40th Anniversary

Posted 3:13 PM, December 10, 2007, by jaruiz

In "Chronic Lung Disease after Premature Birth" from The New England Journal of Medicine (2007 Nov. 8;357(19):1946-1955), Drs. Eugenio Baraldi and Marco Filippone begin their article as follows:

"In 1967, Northway et al. first described a new chronic respiratory disease, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, that developed in premature infants exposed to mechanical ventilation and oxygen supplementation. Two decades later, the same authors found that clinically significant respiratory symptoms and functional abnormalities persisted into adolescence and early adulthood in a cohort of survivors of bronchopulmonary dysplasia, suggesting that lung injuries early in life may have lifelong consequences. Bronchopulmonary dysplasia is now the most common chronic lung disease of infancy in the United States."

For those of you who may not know, Northway is our Bill Northway who did this pioneering work as a junior faculty member in the new Stanford Hospital during the first eight years after it had moved to the campus from San Francisco. His laboratory was at the back end of the basement corridor of the Grant building where I think members of the Siemens group now have their offices. The studies in newborn animals were tedious and difficult, and the animals had to be tended to twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The newborns were exposed to various oxygen concentrations in plastic chambers built by our departmental shop. Henry Kaplan, MD, was chair of radiology, which consisted of the Divisions of Diagnosis, Radiation Therapy, Nuclear Medicine, Radiobiology, and Radiation Physics. Herb Abrams, MD, was chief of diagnosis until the summer of 1967 when he left to become the first tenured chair of radiology at Harvard, leaving me as acting chief for about six months until Frank Zboralske, MD, was hired.

Bill's remarkable work was truly landmark work by a diagnostic radiologist who saw a problem in the infants whose films he reported, took the problem to the laboratory, worked out the cause and the pathology with colleagues in Pathology, and established a new disease entity, which has held up with modification for 40 years. I can not think of a similar contribution by another diagnostic radiologist, but I may be biased by having known him since he was a resident. To read more about Dr. Northway's accomplishments, please see an earlier article on our blog at http://radiology.stanford.edu/blog/archives/2007/06/during_his_firs.html. To access the NEJM article by Drs. Eugenio Baraldi and Marco Filippone, please see http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/19/1946.