Obituary: Alex Kaplan PhD (1910 – 2006)

Abstract

Dr. Alex Kaplan, a past president of AACC and noted clinical chemist and educator, died in Seattle on July 2, 2006, at the age of 96. Besides his devotion to AACC, Dr. Kaplan, known affectionately to his friends, colleagues, and students as “Kap”, is best noted for instituting the first Clinical Chemistry postdoctoral training program in the United States at the University of Washington in Seattle. At the time this training program was started in the early 1960s, the field of Clinical Chemistry was still more of an art form than a science. Automation was just in its infancy, and most tests were carried out in test tubes using mouth pipetting and relatively crude “colorimetric” measurements. If a protein-free filtrate was turbid, then the technologist just added a “tad” more precipitating agent to clarify the solution. Laboratories, even in the larger medical centers, were still small by today’s standards, and management was relatively straightforward. The clinical chemist, however, was called on to assist the ordering physician in test interpretation because few clinicians were well versed in acid-base balance tests for liver and kidney diseases and enzymology. Immunoassays were limited, and most hormone assays were nonspecific or required studies in animals such as the bioassays for pregnancy and hormones such as FSH. The creative mind of Dr. Kaplan recognized that times of change were imminent and would require a new breed of clinical chemists well prepared for a revolution in innovation of technology and clinical medicine. Spurred on by Leonard Skeggs’ Autoanalyzer, new chromatographic techniques, and the invention of RIA by Yalow …