Bernadine Healy (1944–2011)

I met Bernadine Healy in 1991 when I served on the Director's Council of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). She was a kind and thoughtful friend. But most people, particularly women, who never knew the only woman to lead the NIH continue to benefit from her remarkable life, which sadly ended 6 August after a 12-year battle with brain cancer. A cardiologist by training who championed quality medical research, Bernadine was brilliant, charming, fearless, and outspoken. She shaped our nation's health care policies while breaking glass ceilings, opening doors to scientific discovery, and eliminating gender discrimination in research. She did more for women's health in the 20th century than any other scientific leader. When I arrived at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 1993 to serve as President Clinton's HHS secretary, Bernadine's 2-year tenure at NIH was coming to an end, but her impact still endures. Those of us who followed her received too much credit for her initiatives. In just the brief time since President George H.W. Bush recalled her from what is now the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation back to Washington, where in 1984 she served as President Reagan's deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she righted a sprawling, rudderless organization beset by scientific, political, and financial turmoil. “Things are so bad,” she joked at the time of her appointment, “…they couldn't even get a man to be NIH director.” Three weeks later, Bernadine stood before Congress and declared, “We need a moon walk for women.” Her moon walk became the Women's Health Initiative, the most far-reaching clinical trial of women's health ever undertaken. The $625 million study of post-menopausal women continues to mine information critical to their health and longevity, including the evidence that hormone replacement therapy increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Under Bernadine's leadership, the NIH also established the policy of funding only trials that included both men and women when conditions studied affected both genders. That was no small matter. As if they were carbon copies of men, or inconsequential, women had routinely been left out of clinical trials. But as she reminded us when she assumed the presidency of the American Heart Association in 1988, heart disease is a women's disease, too, “not a man's disease in disguise.” At NIH, she also spearheaded the creation of an Institute for Nursing Research and a major intramural laboratory for human genomics, recruiting current NIH Director Francis Collins and other world-class scientists to the Human Genome Project. ![Figure][1] CREDIT: CIMA/AMERICAN RED CROSS When President-elect Clinton tapped me for the HHS post in the fall of 1992, Bernadine was the first to call—to beg my help in convincing Collins to head the Human Genome Project. The president-elect's legal advisors warned me not to do or say anything until I was confirmed, but I trusted Bernadine's instincts, so I called and reassured him that the Clinton Administration needed his leadership. The rest is, as they say, history. Bernadine's own history as a feminist, physician, educator, and crusader against health inequities began in New York City on 2 August 1944, when she was born to second-generation Irish-American parents who had quit high school to help their widowed mothers support their families. As such, they made education paramount in the lives of their four daughters. By age 12, Bernadine knew she wanted to be a physician, rather than a nun, prompting her father to defy the priest who would oppose moving her from parochial school to the prestigious Hunter College High School in Manhattan. (The priest worried that she would become overeducated and forsake motherhood and her traditional role as a woman). Graduating first in her class at Hunter (where years later I served as the college's president, another of our bonds), she went on to Vassar College and then Harvard Medical School. One of just 10 women in a class of 120, she earned her medical degree in 1970, a time when female doctors were regarded with deep skepticism. But that perception only strengthened her resolve to succeed. She completed her training in internal medicine and cardiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, then spent 2 years at the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Bernadine also raised 2 daughters, who with husband Floyd Loop, a cardiac surgeon, survive her. Returning to Hopkins in 1976, she directed the Coronary Care Unit and became the first woman to serve as assistant dean for the school's postdoctoral programs and faculty development. Nearly two decades later, as dean of The Ohio State University College of Medicine and Public Health, she recruited some of the world's finest faculty. Among them was Pascal J. Goldschmidt, who would launch Ohio State's heart and lung institute and heart hospital, and who years later I would recruit to the University of Miami to lead the Miller School of Medicine. As I said, I trusted her instincts. With “profoundly mixed feelings,” Bernadine left Ohio State in July of 1999 to become the first physician to lead the American Red Cross, a change-resistant behemoth splintered by turf battles. Yet she left her mark there, too, improving the safety and availability of the American blood supply before resigning after the 11 September terrorist attacks. By then, a rare tumor had been stalking her brain for more than 2 years, and she faced that challenge with characteristic courage and grace, writing Living Time: Faith and Facts to Transform Your Cancer Journey to help others battle the pernicious disease. As Bernadine once said, she never compromised her core beliefs, never wobbled on what she believed to be the right path, and had the strength to endure the consequences. Her life was too short, but she achieved more in her 67 years than most of us can even dream of accomplishing. She was truly sui generis —one of a kind. [1]: pending:yes