John Newman, M.D. remembered
https://doi.org/10.1002/pul2.12389
Letter to the editor
Dr. John Newman passed from this mortal life on February 20, 2024. I celebrate John's life, even as I mourn his passing.
I met John in 1983 at the first meeting of the National Institutes of Health Primary Pulmonary Hypertension (PPH) Registry investigators. John's pedigree ran deep, but he would never let you know. He attended medical school at Columbia University, where he was influenced by the Nobel Prize work of André Cournand and Dickinson Richards. He trained in internal medicine at Columbia and Johns Hopkins, and this training was followed by a pulmonary fellowship at the University of Colorado, where he cut his teeth as an investigator, mentored by Jack Reeves.
In that first meeting, we wondered what we were doing as we set out to study an exceedingly rare and very terrible disorder. At the time, John and I thought that if we didn't do this; then who would? We were both interested in medicine broadly, pulmonary vascular physiology, and in the emerging science of human genetics; and we had a common goal, along with others in the room, to make life better for those who suffered from PPH.
John and I shared a lot over the years. We shared our advancing understanding of PPH. We marveled at the work of others as basic discoveries were made and as advances in treatment transformed the diagnosis of PPH from a death sentence to a diagnosis with many effective treatments. We also shared good books, the joy of hitting a golf ball (not always straight), the joy of being a grandpa, and an occasional cold beer.
John's generosity knew no bounds. He wrote a classic article on the physiologic approach to PH.1 His article is required reading for residents and fellows who rotate through the Pulmonary Hypertension Care Center at Intermountain Medical Center. Of course, John figured out that I was one of the reviewers of his original submission, and, in classic Newman style, he texted me to say “I should have put you as co-author on the Paul Wood paper, you worked your [tail] off to improve it. Thanks!”
John will be remembered for his contributions to understanding the inheritance of PPH (now called heritable pulmonary arterial hypertension). He was a key member of a wonderful team whose collective work led to the discovery that mutations in the gene encoding BMPR2 caused familial PPH. He was widely known for the “Newman Hypothesis” that many patients diagnosed with PPH had a disease caused by a defective gene, an insight that he and his team showed the world in a seminal article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.2
John should also be remembered for his broad influence upon the field of pulmonary vascular disease, especially his influence on the current generation of talented young physicians and scientists.
Marcus Tullius Cicero anticipated John Newman when he said: “The life given us by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.”
Well done, John!