Bestselling author Michael Fumento remembers: Alexander Langmuir
Leaders & Success: Alexander Langmuir
Investors Business Daily, December 16, 1993
Its part of American folk lore: The man who saves the day and rides off into the sunset without anybody knowing his name. Sometimes he doesnt even leave a silver bullet.
"He had an absolutely profound impact on saving lives," said Alan Summer, Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health and a former student of Langmuirs. "If one wants to include important roles he played, the people he trained and what theyve gone on to do, a figure in the millions (of lives saved) would certainly be true."
In 1949, Langmuir created the epidemiology section at what is now known as the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. He had been called upon to combat a perceived epidemic of malaria but discovered that there wasnt one.
The rolls of the EIS now read like a Whos Who of the medical profession, including surgeon generals, CDC heads, the last head of the Public Health Service, the current director of the World Health Organizations AIDS program, and many deans of the countrys 20 schools of public health.
One example is Henderson himself, who headed up the worlds most successful attempt to control a disease - the World Health Organizations program to eradicate smallpox.
"He emphasized surveillance with regard to disease wherever it occurred, analyzing it and looking at it, and acting if appropriate," Henderson said. "Thats what we did with smallpox eradication. It was basically Langmuirian principles."
The emergency investigative service Langmuir established at the CDC also continues to fly to disease outbreaks at a moments notice.
In recent years, Langmuir became critical of the CDCs handling of AIDS. He believed that the organization was overstating both the overall numbers of infected individuals and especially the risk to non-drug-abusing heterosexuals of contracting the disease.
Langmuir was also quite critical of what has been described as Americas "risk of the week" syndrome. Commenting on the cellular phone brain tumor scare earlier this year, he told Investors Business Daily, "Its perfectly god awful. Its totally irrational."
Langmuir was the CDCs chief epidemiologist from 1949 to 1970. He spent the rest of his life teaching at Harvard Medical School and at Johns Hopkins, from which he had earned his degree in public health.
Read Michael Fumentos additional work on AIDS and on other diseases.