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(Circulation Research. 2007;101:1222.)
© 2007 American Heart Association, Inc.

In Memoriam

Edmund H. Sonnenblick (1932–2007)

Leslie A. Leinwand

From Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Correspondence to Leslie A. Leinwand, Marsico Professor of Excellence, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309. E-mail leslie.leinwand@colorado.edu

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Ed Sonnenblick was simply an intellectual giant in the field of cardiovascular research, and the work that he did will forever shape everyday treatment of heart disease. This piece will briefly summarize his accomplishments, but will mainly serve to honor him as a mentor, teacher, colleague, and friend.

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Ed’s education took him from Wesleyan University where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude in 1954, to Harvard Medical School, where he graduated cum laude and was a member of Alpha Omega Alpha. His residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York culminated in 1960, after which he moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he worked with Stanley Sarnoff. It was there that he wrote his seminal, single author paper in 1962 that concluded that the mechanical performance of the heart was intimately linked to its properties as a muscle. At this point in time, this seems so obvious, but this research changed the face of cardiovascular therapeutics and provided the scientific justification for therapeutic afterload reduction. He stayed on at the NIH where he worked on the relationship of contractility and disease states until 1967, when he moved to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital as Director of Cardiovascular Research. In 1975 he was appointed the first Director of the Cardiology Division at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he remained for the rest of his career.

While at Einstein, Ed attracted many young colleagues to work on cardiac physiology and convinced me, . . . [Full Text of this Article]