2010 in Chicago after a brief illness. He was 88. The immediate cause of death was renal failure associated with advancing prostate cancer, which he'd lived with for over 20 years. When his kidneys began to fail shortly after Thanksgiving, Goldwasser opted for hospice care instead of dialysis, a procedure revolutionized by his discovery. Goldwasser, whose government-funded research began as a Cold War experiment to cure radiation sickness, found and purified erythropoietin, or EPO, which is a naturally-occurring hormone produced by the kidneys to stimulate new red blood cell production. Today, genetically-engineered versions of EPO cure anemia in dialysis and cancer patients and generate billions of dollars in sales for Amgen, Johnson & Johnson and Roche. December 23, 2010 - A study led by Dr. William Clark, published in the Dec. 2010 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal , signals that patients diagnosed with kidney disease, if started too early on dialysis, are at an increased risk of death. On the other hand, early referral to a kidney specialist is clearly linked to better survival rates. The study considered data of 25,910 adult patients in Canada who started dialysis between 2001 and 2007. The researchers looked at the timing of the start of dialysis (early vs. late in the disease progression) and the risk of death in these two groups over time. "Consistently through our research, it was shown that there is no benefit to initiate dialysis prematurely. In fact, it was concluded that it would potentially threaten the