David A. Hamburg (1925-2019).

David Allen Hamburg, who dedicated his life to relieving suffering and reducing the risk of global conflict, died on 21 April 2019 at age 93. His research on human development, stress, and behavior recast understanding of important sources of mental illness. Throughout his career, he shaped institutions and sought ways to bring people together for the causes of health, science, and world peace. Born on 1 October 1925, David was raised in Evansville, Indiana. His grandfather, a pushcart peddler who had fled pogroms in Latvia, helped many relatives escape anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. Foreshadowing his future work on prevention of genocide, David observed, “I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust.” David earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1944 and an M.D. degree from the Indiana University School of Medicine in 1947. He trained in medicine and psychiatry at Michael J. Reese Hospital in Chicago and at Yale University, where he embarked on research on the effect of stress on the brain. There, David met his wife, Beatrix, the first African American woman to graduate from the Yale School of Medicine. After research stints at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., and back at Michael Reese Hospital, David served as chief of the adult psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1958 to 1961. While investigating the biological basis of stress and behavior, David was also immersed in the experiential depths of psychiatry as a graduate of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute—an exceptional range in psychiatry. In 1961, David accepted an appointment as chair of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. He established a new department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, reflecting an inclusive approach to understanding mental illness, and he played a key role in the design and introduction of a new, interdisciplinary human biology program. During this period, David established a relationship with Jane Goodall's Gombe Stream Research Center in Tanzania, where students could undertake field studies of primate behavior. In May 1975, rebels from Zaire's People's Revolutionary Party raided the Gombe reserve and kidnapped three Stanford students and a young researcher from the Netherlands. David immediately traveled to Tanzania and joined the international team negotiating for release of the students. After 10 weeks of tense negotiations, all the students returned unharmed. This searing experience in the midst of stark poverty, deprivation, and conflict marked an inflection point in David's career, where the future and well-being of populations and of humanity as a whole began to take center stage. That same year, David was appointed president of the Institute of Medicine (IOM)—as the health policy arm of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., was then known. The fledgling institute had been founded in 1970 and remained unorganized. David established the core structure of program divisions that has persisted and evolved ever since. He stressed the value of interdisciplinary approaches to complex health issues, and he emphasized the importance of both excellence and relevance in the work of the institute. It was during this period that I served on my first IOM study committee and had an opportunity to witness David in action. He had a remarkable ability to absorb a group's discussion, distill it to the essence, and express emergent ideas in a way that elevated and reformulated the key concepts. ![][1] PHOTO: NEAL BOENZI/ THE NEW YORK TIMES /REDUX In 1980, David was appointed the inaugural director of Harvard University's interfaculty division on health policy research and education. Spanning Harvard's Kennedy School, Medical School, and School of Public Health, the division played into David's predisposition to seek multidisciplinary solutions to complex problems. As a rising professor of health policy at Harvard, I had an opportunity to interact regularly with David. Never one to indulge in small talk and never fully removed from his psychiatric roots, David was always ready to listen and advise on any personal or policy conundrum. He may have just gotten off the phone with a senator or cabinet secretary, but when he turned to you, you felt immediately the benefit of his full attention. In 1982, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a storied philanthropy, called on David to become its president. Here, for 15 years, David found the platform, resources, and latitude to give full voice to his convictions about the threat of global violence, while simultaneously strengthening the foundation's programs in health, education, and science. David established and, with former secretary of state Cyrus Vance, co-chaired the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. Through grants, he supported the Prevention of Proliferation Task Force at the Brookings Institution, which in turn inspired the Nunn-Lugar amendment that helped diminish nuclear arsenals as part of the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991. The strategy of prevention became a central tenet of David's approach, and he later titled his 2015 autobiography A Model of Prevention: Life Lessons. Many accolades were showered on David, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1996, and the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, its highest recognition for public service, in 1998. David relished the achievements of his family, coauthoring with his wife a book on preventing hatred and violence in childhood and adolescent development, and with his son, Eric, a book that stressed positive achievements toward world peace. David was especially proud of his daughter, Margaret, a renowned physician leader in her own right, who served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and served as her father did as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the publisher of Science ). David lived his life and made his mark in an unbroken continuum spanning discovery at the bench, the health of an individual, the well-being of populations, and global survival. In a world beset with conflict, when the capacity to destroy millions of lives has become ever more widely accessible, we will miss David's clear-eyed guidance on preventing the worst expressions of human aggression. [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif