Hermann Lisco papers

Hermann Lisco (1910-2000), M. D., 1936, University of Berlin, was a physician, professor, and pathologist who practiced at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, and later taught at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. He was first doctor to perform an autopsy on an individual who had died of acute radiation poisoning, in 1945, under employment of the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, more widely known as the Manhattan Project. He was among the first to study the effects of plutonium on the human body, and published widely on the subjects of cancer, radiation, and the incidence of leukemia or other diseases in patients treated with radiation therapy.

Lisco was born on 1910 October 24, in Schul-Pforta, Germany. After his graduation from the Gymnasium in Gottingen, Germany in 1929, he received his M.D., cum laude, from the University of Berlin, Germany. In 1936, he worked as an assistant in the Institute of Pathology at the University of Berlin at the Charite-Krankenhaus briefly that year, then departed Germany due to its political climate, having married a Jewish woman and fearing the rise of Nazism. Lisco then worked as an assistant and instructor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School and Hospital from 1936 to 1940, also becoming a Fellow of Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Finney-Howell Cancer Research Foundation from 1938 to 1940. He afterward became a research fellow at the Harvard Cancer Commission, and became a Huntington Memorial Hospital Assistant in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, and served as an instructor of pathology at Harvard Medical School from 1941 to 1944.

In 1944 Lisco was recruited to serve on the staff of the Biology and Health Division of the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. He was a civilian employee of the Manhattan District of the United States Army from 1944 to 1946, including contributing to the devleopment of the atom bomb, and was granted leave from Harvard Medical School. It was during this time, in 1945, that he performed the first autopsies on individuals who died of acute radiation poisoning, in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Lisco frequently held multiple scientific positions simultaneously. He became the Director of the Medical Division and Association Director of Biology Division at the Argonne National Laboratory (1947-1952), and was the Scientific Secretary of the United Nation’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (1957-1958). He served as Senior Pathologist and Research Associate (Assistant and Associate Professor) in the Department of Pathology at the University of Chicago from 1948 to 1962, before returning to Boston to serve as a Senior Research Associate in Pathology at the Cancer Research Institute of the New England Deaconess Hospital (1962-1970). During 1959 to 1968, Lisco traveled extensively and repeatedly throughout Europe, on trips funded by the World Health Organization and the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, visiting research stations, studying cancer, radiation, and often the incidence of leukemia in women who had been treated with radiation therapy for cancer of the cervix uteri.

Lisco’s research varied over the course of his career, but focused on a general theme. In his early career, Lisco wrote primarily on the effect of radiation poisoning, as treated in his “The Acute Radiation Syndrome” in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1952. He wrote a number of works on irradiation in humans and lab animals, acute radiation syndrome, and the carcinogenic effect of plutonium and radiotoxicity of other elements in the 1940s through 1960s, as well as radiation’s effect on the formation of tumors and lymphoma. Much of his later research focused largely on cancer, and on the side effects of radiation therapy on patients being treated for cancer. He conducted a number of trips to Europe in the late 1950s through 1970s and onward that dealt with studying the incidence of leukemia in women treated with radiotherapy for cancer of the cervix uteri, of which a number of notes can be found in this collection. In his memberships on professional organizations and in his private research as a university professor, he devoted himself to the study of the pathologic effects of atomic radiation, and much of his work focused on the importance of Radiological protection and the importance of medical supervision in radiation work, despite its occasional beneficial uses for certain medical human treatments.

Lisco returned to employment at Harvard Medical School in 1967 as an Assistant Dean of Students, became an Associate Dean (1969), an Associate Professor of Anatomy (1970-1977), a Deputy Chairman of Medical Sciences (1977-1982), and retired in 1981 as an Associate Professor of Anatomy. Lisco authored or co-authored fifty-six publications, from 1936 until 1989, as well as nineteen abstracts, twelve semi-annual reports of the Argonne National Laboratory, and was a contributor to eleven other medical publications. He was a fifty-year member of the American Association for Cancer Research, as well as a fifty-year member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For the National Research Council, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Committee on Growth of the National Academy of Sciences from 1954 to 1956 and member and chairman from 1951 to 1956 of the Panel on Environmental Cancer, and a member of the subcommittee on Internal Emitters of the Committees on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation from 1955 to 1961. In 1960, for the International Atomic Energy Agency, he was a member of the Expert Committee on Strontium 90, Vienna, and a member of the Panel on Radiation Damage in Bone, Oxford. He was a member of the Panel on Use of Vital and Health Statistics for Genetic and Radiation Studies for the World Health Organization in 1960, Geneva. From 1961 to 1962, he was a member on the Carcinogenesis Studies Panel of the Advisory Committee to the National Cancer Institute, and in 1964 a consultant to the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. He was also a member of the New England Society of Pathologists, the Society for Developmental Biology, the Massachusetts Society of Pathologists, the Radiation Research Society, the American Society for Experimental Pathology, and the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists. Lisco died in 2000.