Dr. Richard Michael Krause (born 1925)

Richard Michael Krause (January 4, 1925 – January 6, 2015) was an American physician, microbiologist, and immunologist. He was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1975 to 1984. Krause later served as the dean of medicine at Emory University before returning to National Institutes of Health as a senior scientific advisor at the John E. Fogarty International Center. Krause was formerly a longtime professor at Rockefeller University.

Early life and education[edit]

Richard Michael Krause was born in Marietta, Ohio, on January 4, 1925. His father was a chemistry professor at Marietta College.[1] He received a B.A. degree from Marietta in 1947.[2] For two years before graduation, Krause served in the United States Army guarding German prisoners of war at Fort Riley.[1] In 1952 he graduated from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Charles H. Rammelkamp, Jr. was Krause's research mentor.[1] In the course of his medical studies, he participated in epidemiologic research on the prevention of rheumatic fever, which spurred his interest in the relationship between infection and immunity.[2]

Career[edit]

In 1954, following training at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis under immunologist Barry Wood, he joined the Rockefeller Institute and Hospital where he rose to the rank of professor. At Rockefeller, Krause worked with his role models Oswald Avery and Rebecca Lancefield and became lifelong friends with Purnell W. Choppin and Maclyn McCarty.[1][2] The persistent theme underlying his research concerned the substances in bacteria that stimulate the body's immune system. This is best exemplified by his research on the immune response to streptococcal polysaccharides. This led to an examination of the genetic factors that influenced the immune response. In recognition of his research achievements, he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1977.[2]

Appointed the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 1975, Krause was among the first to perceive "the return of the microbes." He guided the institute through a period of growth to cope with the re-emergence of microbial diseases as health threats and to stimulate research on the complexity of the immune system.[2]

NIAID was reorganized along programmatic lines and the Rocky Mountain Laboratory was restructured into independent laboratories. The institute also led the way in recombinant DNA research and technology. Responding to the emergence of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, Krause organized field studies in Haiti and Zaire in the search for the origins of the virus.[2] Krause faced criticism over his level of urgency in addressing the AIDS crisis. Activists such as Larry Kramer stated that Krause "crucified" the gay population by not responding quicker to the crisis.[3]

In July 1984, Krause retired from the U.S. Public Health Service and became dean of medicine at Emory University. In 1989, he returned to National Institutes of Health (NIH) to become a senior scientific advisor at the Fogarty International Center.[2]

Personal life[edit]

Krause died on January 6, 2015, in Washington, D.C.[3] Scientist and NIH researcher Michael W. Krauseis his grandnephew.[3]

References[edit]

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a b c d Morens, David M. (2016-02-16). "Richard M. Krause: Avuncular avatar of microbial science" (PDF). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 113 (7): 1681–1683. Bibcode:2016PNAS..113.1681M. doi:10.1073/pnas.1525722113. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 4763793. PMID 26831081.
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a b c d e f g "Richard M. Krause, M.D." National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
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a b c Bernstein, Adam (2015-01-13). "Richard Krause, science administrator in AIDS crisis, dies at 90". Washington Post. Retrieved 2020-03-28.

https://www.americanepidemiologicalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/PNAS-2016-Morens-1525722113.pdf

PNAS-2016-Morens-1525722113.pdf

RETROSPECTIVE

RichardM. Krause: Avuncular avatar of microbial science

David M. Morensa,1

Richard M. Krause (“rhymes with lousy” he always said, with a twinkle in his eye), was born in the normal way on January 4, 1925. This seems to have been his last conventional act. When he died two days after his 90th birthday, on January 6, 2015, Richard left in his wake a rollicking, gregarious, peripatetic, philanthropic, fun-loving romp through nine nonstop decades. In the process, he managed to leave his stamp on 20th century biomedical science.

Best known for his nine-year Directorship (1975– 1984) of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Richard took the reins of the (now) nearly five billiondollar- a-year Institute at a time when infectious diseases research was being dialed back under the belief that vaccines and antibiotics had all but conquered infectious diseases. Biomedical science, it was then said, should move on to other challenges. Richard knew better: he tightened NIAID’s programs, set it on a global course, steered it through the 1976 “swine flu affair” (1), and wrote a book that predicted shocking epidemics to come. Ironically, AIDS surfaced within months of publication of The Restless Tide (2): Richard was soon flying off to Haiti and Central Africa for a first-hand look at the new pandemic, pivoting NIAID to address every aspect of it. “Surround yourself with people smarter than you,” he often said. His own very smart scientific team focused on the dynamism of emerging diseases like AIDS, and created momentum toward a seminal 1992 Institute of Medicine report on infectious threats (3) that still (in 2016) shapes the national research agenda.

After nine successful years asNIAIDDirector, Richard quietly stepped out of the limelight, opining simply, “no Director should serve more than 10 years.” Having accepted position and power “matter-of-factly,” he now gave it up without regret, stepping back into the role of scientist and continuing to fully enjoy many things, large and small. Richard loved humanity and cared about those less fortunate. He was almost as happy in backwater villages of third-world countries as he was in five-star hotels of the world’s great metropolises, the only things missing in the backwaters being a good meal and a proper drink.

Richard was a completely self-styled American original, in the mold of British eccentrics. No description can do justice to the celebratory carnival that was his life. Always dressed to the nines, he exuded a dapper, debonair, flower-in-the-buttonhole bonhomie straight out of a Fred Astaire film. Thin and slight of frame, Richard moved with grace, even though daily workouts continued well into his late 70s, and after two quadruple bypass surgeries, had pumped up his biceps and abs like Charles Atlas. As a lavish annual donor to all of Washington, DC’s major arts organizations, Richard got the best seats at the symphony, opera, and theater. He regularly shared these with friends. His two seats at the District Shakespeare Company’s Landsburgh Theater were front row, dead center, knees inches from the stage. “You don’t have a good seat,” hewould say, “if the actors aren’t spitting on you.” In Richard’s seats, they usually did. Forewarned friends came to the theater with napkins, handkerchiefs, or small towels.

A performer at heart, Richard needed his own audiences to captivate. He would hold forth for hours drawing upon a vast store of serious and whimsical knowledge, with a fondness for the peccadillos of the rich and famous, the more salacious the better. He could of course tell you just about everything Sydney Smith ever said to Lady Gray, or that Winston Churchill never said to Lady Astor. Though soft-spoken, he was unstoppable when he got going in a bar or restaurant, wearing everyone down with exhausting sociability. Approachable, eminently likeable, extremely generous, avuncular, and happiest around young scientists, Richard reminded the older crowd of the legendary William Henry (“Popsy”) Welch (1850–1934). Despite a ribald sense of humor and a willingness to tell stories about his own foibles, and to occasionally be the butt of a good-natured joke, Richard was nevertheless at heart dignified, serious, and reflective. On occasion he would share philosophical and spiritual thoughts expressing old-fashioned, Midwestern Bible-belt values, and an unshakeable will to absorb tragedies and to replenish optimism.

Richard traveled everywhere and had a friend or two in every port of call. Almost every trip was enriched by dinners, museums trips, art-buying forays, and rousing soirées. Checking into hotels he would gleefully repeat the “Krause, rhymes with lousy” mantra. He tipped generously and insisted that the waiters and bellhops treat him like a rich uncle. Afternoon meant an obligatory Stoli martini-on-the-rocks with a Spanish olive and an extra glass of ice cubes, with which he absently played. Woe unto the waiter who brought it with an onion instead of an olive or, far worse, an olive stuffed with a pimento. The olive was sacrosanct, but he usually let it sit or gave it away. Dinner meant linen, silverware, impeccable service, meat-and-potato staples that mustn’t be undercooked or contain any spice, and conversations on wide-ranging subjects that included everything British, almost all foreign cultures, politics, wars, exploration, sailing techniques, astronomy, and romantic interpretations of all of the arts. To Richard, who knew just about everything that Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks had ever said or done, the Transit of Venus was almost an erotic romance.

Richard’s carefully arranged soirées were peopled by friends and acquaintances with “cultivated” and “big picture” views, among them the promising young and impressionable, the old and wise, and the certifiably dead and buried. This latter group included luminaries from the arts, science, politics, and adventure, such as Eugène Delacroix, Katsushika Hokusai, Otto von Bismarck, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gertrude Stein, among hundreds of others. He knew everything worth knowing about them, wove them into discussions, and often referred to them in the present tense, as if they might walk through the door at any minute, pour a drink, and pick up the thread of a conversation dropped decades—or centuries—earlier. “Now, YOU KNOW what Miss Nightingale would think about that,” he might say, looking at you conspiratorially, as if you, he, and Florence were all best friends.

Having come of age in the 1940s, Richard liked what he saw of bygone days and did what he could to preserve them. He refused to use email and avoided any device more modern than a box telephone, which he used to call up friends regularly for a “chin wag.” He eventually got a cell phone but never mastered it. If you didn’t limit your voice mail length, he would leave 10- or 15-minute soliloquies on any subject. When computer contact lists replaced Rolodexes, he found a few younger friends whose numbers he memorized, and rang them up repeatedly for help in looking up phone numbers. Until nearly the end of his life he asked office assistants to make coffee and take his shirts to the drycleaner, which they invariably did because, as one professional woman who adored him, and who knew him to be kind and respectful to all, put it: “I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, but he’s Dr. Krause, if I said anything he just wouldn’t understand.”

Unbeknownst to most colleagues, Richard led a double life as a philanthropist to his alma mater, Marietta College, and served as life-long paterfamilias to a large and adoring extended family of siblings, nephews, and nieces, and to their children and grandchildren, providing many with moral and sometimes significant financial support. One day in the early 1980s, Richard’s niece was startled by a phone call from someone claiming to be the White House operator. She hung up on what was surely a prank call, but the caller persisted and she finally answered. Richard, it turned out, was lunching with President Reagan and couldn’t remember the punch line to a joke he had been told by his six-year-old grandnephew. The child got on the phone, retold the joke, and Richard continued his lunch with the President. What the President thought about the joke is apparently lost to history.

Born in the historic river town of Marietta, Ohio, Richard was exposed to scholarly life from boyhood, as his father was a Marietta College chemistry professor. Graduating from that institution in 1947—his studies having been interrupted by a two-year Army stint guarding German prisoners of war at Fort Riley, Kansas—Richard moved on to Case Western Reserve University Medical School. Before graduating in 1952, he had a life-changing experience: summer research at Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming, studying the new wonder drug, penicillin, in the prevention of acute rheumatic fever. In that era, streptococcal diseases were important causes of mortality, and Richard had walked right up to the cutting edge of medical science.

Richard’s research mentor, Charles Rammelkamp (1911–1983), was a broad-shouldered, heroic-looking and charismatic “triple threat”: a physician-researcher skilled in epidemiology, clinical medicine, and microbiology/ immunology. Their research proved that penicillin prevented rheumatic fever, revolutionizing treatment and control of streptococcal disease, and bringing Richard and the rest of the team both fame and a Group Lasker Award. Over the rest of his life, Richard retold the story of how “Rammel” then went on to orchestrate his early career, pulling strings when needed. He rejected any other model of physician education than Rammelkamp’s, in which strong mentors forcefully shape the careers of grateful young men and women who have little say in the matter. Richard went on to become both a triple threat and a wonderful mentor in his own right, but was too respectful of his protégés to do anything more than firmly recommend what they ought to do. They usually did it.

Rammelkamp arranged a two-year internship/residency for Richard at Barnes Hospital, Washington University under football hall-of-famer-turned-immunologist W. Barry Wood (1910–1971), and then went on to one of the nation’s most prestigious medical research establishments, New York’s Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There Richard met one of his heroes, the long-retired Oswald Avery (1877– 1955), worked with another hero, streptococcal researcher Rebecca Craighill Lancefield (1895–1981; he always called her “Mrs. Lancefield”), and became lifelong friends with scientists like the noted virologist Purnell Choppin and Maclyn “Mac” McCarty (1911– 2005), whose studies on pneumococcal transformation with Avery and Colin McLeod (1909–1972) initiated the modern genomics era and directly led to the discoveries of Watson and Crick.

At The Rockefeller Institute, Richard showed a preference for team research over individual effort. His work clarifying streptococcal immunity was important if not ground-breaking. His 21 years at The Rockefeller were interrupted by a three-year spell as Washington University Professor of Epidemiology and of Medicine. He then returned to The Rockefeller as Professor and Senior Physician at the hospital. It was from that position that Richard, by then a nationally prominent scientist, was recruited as NIAID director. He remained at NIAID and at the Fogarty International Center for the rest of his life, excepting a five-year deanship building up Emory Medical School’s research programs.

Richard worked virtually full time as a scientist almost to the end of his life. During his last three years he was slowed by recurring health problems, but he still traveled widely and held forth with friends and family. He had kept many close personal friends from the old days, but now these friends-for-life were dying one by one: Mac, epidemiologist Bill Jordan (1917–2008), geneticist Alick Bearn (1923–2009), and immunologist Sheldon Cohen (1919–2013). Refusing to be nostalgic, Richard would simply say, “Well, he put in a few good innings,” and change the subject.

But perhaps somehow sensing that time was running out, at age 89, six months before his death, Richard began turning things over to colleagues. Two days before his death, when two close friends were bedridden with presumed H3N2 influenza, Richard developed cough and progressive respiratory distress. He was nevertheless bullishly planning spring events and fanciful soirées. These were not to be. Rushed from home to the intensive care unit with pneumonia, sepsis, shock, and organ failure, Richard accepted the inevitable and asked that life support be withdrawn. He had arranged almost everything to avoid leaving loose ends for family and friends. Scientific manuscripts still being worked on had been placed in the hands of coauthors. A small fortune’s worth of art had already been donated to Marietta College. His home and office had both been neatly boxed up. He had spent time with all of his many nephews and nieces and their children. He had put in more than a few good innings, had even carried the game into overtime, but he understood that although life was a game that might be played well, it could not be won. It was characteristic of Richard’s utter lack of self-importance that he asked to be buried in an Army private’s uniform. No one who knew him will ever forget him. Richard: fare thee well. We’ll see you some day in some celestial lounge, say about 5 o’clock, and oh yes, please put us down on your tab for a couple Stoli martinis-on-the-rocks.

Acknowledgments

I thank Trent Elliott, Linda Reck, and Jeffery Taubenberger, for help in fact-checking and manuscript editing, and Klaus Eichmann for providing the photograph.

R E T R O S P E C T IVE

Christmas, 2008. Richard M. Krause stands at the Nashville,

Tennessee, gravesite of his heroOswald T. Avery (1877–

1955), the Rockefeller scientist who developed bacterial

disease immunotherapy and studied the mysterious phenomenon

of pneumococcal transformation. The transforming

factor turnedout tobeDNA. Richardusedtheaboveimage in

a talk, labeling the slide with a passage from Goethe’s Faust

(lines 682–683): “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

erwirb es, umes zu besitzen” (“What you have inherited from

your fathers, must first be earned before it is yours”). Image

courtesy of Klaus Eichmann.

aOffice of the Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892-2520

Author contributions: D.M.M. wrote the paper.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

1Email: dm270q@nih.gov.

www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1525722113 PNAS Early Edition | 1 of 3

1 Neustadt RE, Fineberg HV (1978) The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Slope (United States Department of Health,

Education and Welfare, Washington, DC).

2 Krause RM (1981) The Restless Tide: The Persistent Challenge of the Microbial World (National Foundation for Infectious Diseases,

Washington, DC).

3 Committee on Microbial Threats to Health, Institute of Medicine (1992) Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United

States (National Academy Press, Washington, DC).

Morens PNAS Early Edition | 3 of 3

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