William Hamilton Daughaday

Abstract

Pioneer of growth hormone research and leading clinical endocrinologist. Born in Chicago, IL, USA, on Feb 12, 1918, he died in Milwaukee, WI, USA, on May 3, 2013, aged 95 years. William Daughaday could trace his interest in endocrinology back to high school, when a friend's father was Paul Starr, the head of endocrinology at Northwestern University Medical School. During the Great Depression, Starr was forced to support himself through private practice but he maintained a laboratory that his son's young friend visited and worked in after his first year of medical school. “Working in that research lab that summer really turned him on”, says Clay Semenkovich, a former student of Daughaday's who is Chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Lipid Research at Washington University in St Louis. “Something clicked. He thought it was the most wonderful thing to study basic processes that could be translated to people.” From that summer, it seems, Daughaday's course was set. Entering Harvard in 1936 he gravitated towards the biology department, which was headed by an endocrinologist, and spent two summers at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbour, Maine, where he studied the effect of castration on the development of adrenal adenomas in mice. By the time he had graduated from Harvard Medical School, his interest in endocrinology was established. In 1947, he was recruited to the School of Medicine at Washington University in St Louis where he worked as an assistant resident in medicine. Soon after, he began a research fellowship in the laboratory of Nobel Laureates Gerty and Carl Cori. By 1951, he had become the first director of the metabolism division, now the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Lipid Research. He would work at the university for the next 47 years, where he was the founding director of Washington University's Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, in 1975, and its successor, the Diabetes Research and Training Center. In 1957, Daughaday and a colleague published a landmark paper in the field of growth hormone research. “They were trying to figure out a way to measure the biological activity of growth hormone…and made this seminal discovery that growth hormone didn't exert its growth-promoting effects directly, but indirectly through this group of substances called somatomedins or insulin-like growth factors”, explains Steven Chernausek, the Edith Kinney Gaylord Endowed Chair in Pediatric Diabetes/Endocrinology at Oklahoma University. Although scientists had understood for some time that the hormone was a growth-promoting substance, until that point “no one had a clue as to how it did what it did”, he says. Daughaday and his colleague showed that although purified growth hormone had no growth-promoting effects itself in vitro, the serum of mice that had been injected with growth hormone did have in-vitro biological effects. “He pretty much nailed it in this one paper that there was some substance that growth hormone produced incredibly rapidly in vivo that seemed to have growth-promoting properties that wasn't the growth hormone itself”, says Peter Rotwein, Professor and Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Oregon Health and Science University. It took some years for the wider scientific establishment to catch on, but by the 1980s Daughaday's hypothesis had been fleshed out and broadly confirmed. “It really changed the way people thought about the control of growth”, says Rotwein. “That idea caused a lot of intellectual ferment and continues to be a touchstone that people use. It still stands up.” Daughaday's other contributions included discovering corticosteroid binding globulin, and uncovering the mechanism by which large tumours cause low blood sugar concentrations. “The phenomenon of tumour hypoglycaemia turned out also to be caused by insulin-like growth factor-2 and he published a number of important papers on that later on in his career”, says Rotwein. “He also worked on human growth disorders and growth hormone insensitivity.” Daughaday always maintained a focus on translating basic observations to the care of patients. “He was a breed that we need but is vanishing quickly—a world class scientist who was connected to people and diseases. At a time when people were under such pressure to do other things, Bill Daughaday insisted on actually seeing the patients”, says Semenkovich. Highly regarded as a teacher and mentor, he trained many endocrinologists. Among his many honours was the Fred Conrad Koch Award of the Endocrine Society. He is survived by his two children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.