The Henry Lynch Lifetime Achievement Award

Presentation of the Second Henry Lynch Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor Albert Lowenfels, New York, during the 4th International Symposium on Inherited Diseases of the Pancreas, Chicago, November 8th, 2003

Albert Lowenfels was born in New Rochelle, New York, the youngest of Albert and Corinne Lowenfels' three children. When he was only one, the family moved to one of the last remaining farms in White Plains, New York, where Albert grew up having to take his fair share of the hard work on the farm, but found time for carpentry and ham radio.

He rode his pony to the small, one-room schoolhouse where he started his elementary education. He graduated from White Plains High School in 1944. By that time, Albert had already established a versatile and energetic lifestyle which still characterizes him today.

Albert attended the University of Vermont in Burlington until his college work was interrupted with a year in the United States Navy. Discharged at the end of WWII, Al returned to the University of Vermont and majored in Chemistry, and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After many phone calls to his girlfriend in Illinois, the operator suggested that marriage would be cheaper, so Albert married Doris Becker in June 1948.

They both graduated from the University of Vermont in June 1949. Albert cum laude.

Albert tells how he successfully removed a cinder from someone's eye, whilst still at school. Pleased with the immediate tangible result, he decided to choose medicine as a career, rather than pure scientific research. At the University of Vermont Medical School, he began using punched cards to organize his medical references, a precursor to today's more advanced data-base techniques.

In his third year, Albert transferred to the New York University College of Medicine, where he graduated in 1952. Because of his love of carpentry he trained in surgery at Bellevue Hospital. Despite long hours in the hospital, working alternate nights and alternate weekends, he also found the time and energy to be a devoted husband and father to his four children.

At the end of his surgical training in 1959, Albert entered private practice in White Plains, New York, For several years, he led the life of a busy suburban surgeon with a growing family and a librarian wife. Eventually he joined the staff of a municipal hospital in Westchester County where, in a more academic environment he performed general surgery and trained surgical residents. Albert is remembered for being a skilful surgeon, an excellent teacher, a good administrator but above all, for skiing to work during a blizzard.

The 1970s brought further changes. Al joined Project Hope in Tunisia for three months. In 1971, with support from the C.D. Smithers Foundation, he published two books: "The Alcoholic Patient in Surgery," which presented a surgical approach to what had traditionally been considered a medical or psychiatric disease, and a few years later, "Companion Guide to Surgical Diagnosis." This popular elementary text was translated into several languages and used in many countries. Part of the charm of the book were the illustrations, mostly drawn by the author.

There was another decisive step in 1977. He spent three months with the International Agency for Research on Cancer at the World Health Organization office in Lyon, France where Al studied the epidemiology of esophageal cancer in northwest France. He remembers how when entering each Brittany home to interview the residents, he would invariably be offered a glass of Calvados, the local pride and, of course, one of the project's major risk factors.

Meanwhile, although still practicing as a surgeon, his interest in epidemiology grew and in 1982, he took a summer epidemiology course at Amherst College. He had become Professor of Community and Preventative Medicine in New York Medical College in 1981 and whilst continuing to teach as Professor of Surgery at the college, he retired from active surgical practice in 1985.

Albert's work led to his appointment in 1993, as Senior Associate and Co-Director of the Program for Clinical Epidemiology at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, Italy. Here he started working closely with Peter Boyle and Patrick Maisonneuve.
During this third stage in Albert's life, he became interested in the risk factors associated with cancer. In subsequent years, numerous papers have dealt with the risk factors for gallbladder and especially pancreatic cancer. This is where Albert and I met, when, in 1990, he saw one of our posters at the American Pancreatic Association meeting here in Chicago.

He asked whether he could have the data that we had collated from our patients (N Engl J Med 328: 1433-1437, 1993).

(This photo was taken in Lueneburg, Germany, at the last discussion of the group contributing to the paper. First row: C.S. Pitchumoni, A.B. Lowenfels, P. Bode, P. Maisonneuve. Second row: V. di Francesco, P.-C. Gregory, E.P. DiMagno, P.G. Lankisch, A. Andrén-Sandberg, R. Ammann)

This made me a co-author of Albert's famous paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. Albert became an expert in finding and defining risk factors for cancer. His expertise led to much correspondence in world famous journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Gastroenterology, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Journal of National Cancer Institute.

He is still a member of the American College of Surgeons, the American Public Health Association, the American Gastroenterological Association, and the American Association for the History of Medicine, the American Pancreatic Association and the International Association of Pancreatology.

The European gastroenterologists especially remember him as the guest speaker at the European Pancreatic Club 1999 meeting in Luneburg and as the recipient of the Boas medal in 2000, at the Hamburg meeting of the German Society of Gastroenterology and Metabolism (figure 4). Boas was the first German gastroenterologist and his achievements are honored by German gastroenterologist annually, with the presentation of this medal to a very distinguished scientist from abroad.

(Albert Lowenfels received the Boas medal from P.G. Lankisch, President of the German Society of Gastroenterology and Metabolism, Hamburg, 2000)

As Albert receives the second Henry Lynch Lifetime Achievement Award, scientists worldwide wish him many more years of scientific interest. We all trust that he will continue to share his expertise with us and to stimulate us with new ideas. Finally, we wish him time to enjoy his home and family and trust that he and Doris will be able to continue traveling, meeting friends and exploring new places.