In Memoriam: Elwood Jensen (1920–2012)

Abstract

With the death of Elwood Jensen at age 92 years, on December 16, 2012, the nuclear receptor field lost one of the true pioneers of steroid hormone receptors and their actions in endocrinology and disease. Dr Jensen was president of The Endocrine Society (1980–1981), a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was the Distinguished University Professor and George and Elizabeth Wile Chair in Cancer Research at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine’s Vontz Center for Molecular Studies at the time of his death. He was previously the Charles B. Huggins Chair and Director of the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Chicago, where he carried out his ground-breaking work on understanding estrogen action. Elwood was especially interested in the causes and treatment of hormone-dependent breast cancer, with a primary focus on the estrogen receptor (ER)as a target and predictor of response to hormone-based therapies. His research revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, first by demonstrating that approximately 70%–75% of all breast cancers express ER , and then by showing that women whose cancers expressed significant levels of ER benefited from nontoxic therapies that either eliminated the source of estrogens and/or included the use of estrogen antagonists such as tamoxifen. Elwood Jensen was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1920 and received his bachelor’s degree from Wittenberg University (Springfield, Ohio) in 1940, followed by a PhD degree in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1944, where he worked with Morris Karasch not only on the development of poison gases for the war effort but also to develop a metal-catalyzed free radical addition of CXCl3 compounds to alkenes, which became known as the Karasch addition. With the help of Karasch, Elwood was then able to spend a postdoctoral year in Zurich, Switzerland, on a Guggenheim fellowship with Leopold Ruzicka at the Swiss Federal Technical Institute. Details of his research in Switzerland remain somewhat obscure, but as a measure of the daredevil enthusiasm and determination that would serve him well in later research on steroid hormone action, Elwood used this opportunity to climb the Matterhorn, the last major mountain in Europe to be