Kilmer S. McCully, a Harvard Medical School Pathologist in the 1960s and 1970s, whose colleagues exiled him to the basement to insist – rightly, proved that homocysteine, an amino acid, is overlooked as a potential factor in Mass.
His daughter, Martha McCully, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. His death was not widely mentioned at that time.
Still discussed today, Dr. McCully’s theory was that inadequate intake of certain B vitamins causes high levels of homocysteine ​​in the blood, hardening of the arteries with plaque. The idea challenged the pattern that focuses on cholesterol supported by the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. McCully did not believe that cholesterol should be ignored, but he thought it was negligent to ignore the importance of homocysteine. His bosses at Harvard disagreed. First, they moved his workshop beneath the ground. Then he was told to leave. He struggled to find a job for years.
“It was very traumatic,” he told the New York Times Gina Kolata medical journalist in 1995. “People don’t believe you, they think you’re crazy.”
Dr. McCully, shaping himself as a germ hunter similar to Louis Pasteur, stumbled to homocysteine ​​in the late 1960s at a medical conference in Boston. There he learned about homocystinuria, a genetic disease in which the high homocysteine ​​is found in the urine of some children with disabilities.
Presenting the case of homocystinuria to a 9 -year -old girl, doctors said her uncle had died of a stroke in the 1930s, when she was 8 years old and had the same disease. “How could an eight years have died the way the elderly do?” Dr. McCully wrote, with his daughter, in “The Heart Revolution” (1999).
When Dr. McCully watched the autopsy exhibition and tissue samples, it was surprised: the boy had hardened arteries, but there was no cholesterol or fat in the accumulation of the plaque. A few months later, he learned about a little boy who had died of recently. It also had hard arteries.
“I just slept for two weeks,” he wrote.
In 1969, Dr. McCully published a document on cases in the American journal Pathology. The following year, in the same magazine, he described what happened after putting rabbits with high doses of homocysteine. “The aorts of all 13 animals injected with homocysteine ​​were moderately dense,” he wrote, “compared to the tests.”
Dr. McCully followed other studies. He suggested that people with low folic acid and vitamins B6 and B12 should consume five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. It also recommended the development of blood tests for homocysteine.
The medical profession responded with “stone silence”, Dr. McCully told the Times. In 1979, he said, the president of his department at Harvard told him, “We believe you have not proven your theory.” He decided to leave and was unemployed until 1981, when a veteran hospital at Providence, Ri, hired him as a physician.
“I felt about him and admired him,” said J. David Spence, a peer professor at the University of Western Ontario who studies homocysteine. “He was neglected more than they should have been. It was sad.”
This began to change in the early 1990s, when long -term large -scale studies on heart disease risks revealed that Dr. McCully was actually heading to the right path when Harvard retreated to the basement.
Data from the Framingham Heart study, which began in 1948 and still carried out, showed higher rates of hardened arteries associated with the brain among participants with increased homocysteine ​​levels. A study by Harvard’s Public Health School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that men with high homocysteine ​​had a triple risk of suffering a heart attack by men with lower levels.
“At the end of the day, he was right in the sense that homocysteine ​​is an indicator of a higher risk of cardiovascular disease,” Meir Stampfer, a Harvard epidemiologist who helped to lead the study, said in an interview. “He gets the credit for the development of this theory and helping to provide evidence for it.”
Kilmer Serjus McCully was born on December 23, 1933, in Daykin, Neb., And raised in Alexandria, his father, Harold McCully, was an expert in the US Department of Education. His mother, Lulu (Litwinenco) McCully, was an artist and piano teacher.
As a teenager, Kilmer was thrilled by the “Hunters Microbe”, the 1926 book by Paul de Kruif for Pasteur, Walter Reed, Robert Koch and others who explored infectious diseases. He knew almost immediately that he wanted to become a scientist.
He studied biochemistry, psychology and chemistry at Harvard, where he took lessons with psychologist BF Skinner and graduated in 1955, known as Kim to his friends, continued to win his degree in 1959.
Following an internship and postdoctoral scholarship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. McCully joined the Harvard Medical School Department in 1965.
He married Annina Jacobs in 1955. He died in 2023.
In addition to their daughter, Martha, she survives their son, Michael. Two grandchildren; Two big-gongs. And a sister, Marilyn McCully.
After studies in the 1990s supported his theory, Dr. McCully became a media star.
The New York Times magazine described him in an article in 1997 led by “The Fall and Rise of Kilmer McCully”. In the NPR “Fresh Air” program in 1999, he told Terry Gross, the host: “It’s extremely satisfying for me, because when I was a young man, that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”
But homocysteine ​​remains a controversial theme in medicine.
The main medical organizations have not recommended tests for this, reporting mixed results from studies considering whether the decrease in homocysteine ​​leads to a decrease in cardiovascular events. (There are stronger indications that it can help prevent strokes.)
“It’s a strange business for me that people still don’t pay enough attention to it,” Dr. Spence said. “Maybe the doctors didn’t like their biochemistry lessons.”
As for Harvard, Dr. McCully’s family said he was never bitter for his treatment there. In a reunion of a Medical School in 1999, his classmates presented him with a silver platter.
He was registered, “to Kim McCully, who saw the truth before the rest, indeed before the rest of the medicine and who would not go aside.”
