John Mendelsohn
The medical innovator made MD Anderson a cancer-care giant.
We live in an age of great biomedical advances, but these don’t happen by themselves. They require human ingenuity to discover new therapies, and then human organizations to deliver them to millions of patients. A man who excelled in both was John Mendelsohn, who died this month at age 82.
The Cincinnati native studied at Harvard in the laboratory of biochemist James Watson of double helix fame. Mendelsohn first made his own mark as a cancer researcher, developing with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego,...