Arnold M. Katz, MD

Abstract

Arnold M. Katz was born in Chicago. His mother was a piano teacher; his father, Louis N. Katz, was an internationally renowned cardiologist and cardiovascular physiologist who received a Lasker award and was President of both the American Physiological Society and the American Heart Association. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Arnold spent a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he participated in a study of the physico-chemical properties of skeletal muscle. As a medical student, he spent 2 summers in his father’s laboratory at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago studying control of and interactions between coronary blood flow, left ventricular volume, and the energetics of the heart. In 1955, he first authored his first paper in Circulation Research on this subject.1 Thus, even before completing medical school, he had already worked in 2 areas—muscle chemistry and control of ventricular performance—to which he devoted much of his life as an investigator. After receiving his MD cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1956, Katz trained in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He spent 2 years in the Laboratory of Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Christian B. Anfinsen Jr, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he trained in and conducted research on protein chemistry. A paper on peptide separation and analysis, published in 1959 with Anfinsen, was identified by Current Contents as a Citation Classic.2 He then trained in clinical cardiology with Paul Wood, considered the leading clinical cardiologist of the era, at the Institute of Cardiology in London, followed by a 3-year advanced fellowship in muscle biochemistry with another distinguished scientist, W.F.H.M. Mommarets, at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Thus, after training in basic science, clinical …