Richard Tidball Johnson, MD, Distinguished Professor and past Director, Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins University, past President of the American Neurological Association, and past Editor of Annals of Neurology, who is widely regarded as the “Father of Neurovirology,” died on November 22, 2015 of pneumonia at the age of 84 (Fig). He had been active up until the last weeks of his life, giving lectures at medical centers around the nation and overseas. Richard T. Johnson, 1931–2015. The medicine house staff were having a party at the Chief Resident's house. In the kitchen, Rod Beard, a young attending, lifted his drink and congratulated me for being selected as an assistant resident. At that time I wanted nothing more than to stay at Stanford and practice internal medicine in Pacific Heights. Sadly I informed him that I had just received my draft notice and would probably be going to Korea. “You don't want to do that!” he said. I agreed. He asked why I did not do research in the Army—possibly in virology. I laughed. I had never done any research, and there was no field that I knew less well than virology. “Then you would be bound to learn something,” he chided. That off-the-cuff kitchen conversation changed my life. Dr Johnson joined the Department of Virus Diseases at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where he studied herpes simplex virus, arthropod-borne viruses, and enterovirus infections of the nervous system. In 1959, he joined the neurology residency program at Massachusetts General Hospital and did a fellowship in Neuropathology. From 1962 to 1964, as a fellow of the US Public Health Service, he worked in the Department of Microbiology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra, Australia. In 1964 he joined the Department of Neurology at Case Western University in Cleveland as a faculty member, and in 1969 became the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Neurology at Johns Hopkins University, where he spent the remainder of his academic career. While working at Walter Reed in the 1950s, Dr Johnson met Dr D. Carleton Gajdusek, 1976 Nobel Prize winner for his work on transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. In 1964, Dr Johnson himself observed a case of kuru in Papua New Guinea. When he was at Johns Hopkins, he held joint laboratory meetings with Gajdusek's laboratory. He helped examine the first chimpanzee that developed signs of kuru after Gajdusek experimentally inoculated it with brain extracts from a human victim. Together with Dr Guy McKhann of Stanford, he helped start the Johns Hopkins Department of Neurology. Dr McKhann recalls that the search committee for the first director of this department was headed by Vernon Mountcastle, the legendary founder of neuroscience, and after much deliberation had “narrowed the field down to Dick Johnson and me. It was Vernon's idea to get us both, so we both arrived at Johns Hopkins and spent the rest of our careers here. I took over running the department and Dick built up the research side.” Dr Johnson served as director of the Department of Neurology from 1988 until 1997 and also had a joint appointment in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. He mentored more than 55 postdoctoral fellows in virology, neurology, immunology, and neurovirology, with at least 10 of them going on to become heads of their own departments, and he served on the faculties of medical schools in Australia, Germany, Iran, Peru, and Thailand. He influenced hundreds, if not thousands, of medical students, undergraduates, and postdoctoral fellows through his charismatic and spellbinding lectures, and through direct mentoring. Many people considered him a “mentor's mentor” because of his insight, perseverance, and dogged enthusiasm for his trainees. In addition to his immense skill as a researcher, Johnson also was an expert clinician—patients came from all over the world with mysterious infections of the nervous system to see him. He also was the founder of the multiple sclerosis clinic at Johns Hopkins. Dr Johnson developed a multidisciplinary laboratory group to study viruses linked to a wide variety of chronic neurological diseases. During this period, he also traveled widely overseas, establishing laboratories to study infectious diseases and teach. His extensive travels earned him the affectionate nickname, the “Pan Am Professor,” for the old international airline, Pan American. He was an exceptionally good storyteller, practicing his repartee upon his fellows, and greatly enjoyed attending scientific meetings, where he regaled all with tales of his travels, and of the pioneers of neurology and neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital or Johns Hopkins. During his directorship of neurology, Dr Johnson expanded the faculty from 40 to more than 100 and established new programs, including neurointensive care and epilepsy monitoring. He was a prolific researcher, publishing more than 300 peer-reviewed articles in professional journals and book chapters, and editing 16 books. He published a single author book titled, Viral Infections of the Nervous System, a landmark text first published in 1982 with a second edition in 1998. He served on the editorial board of 22 journals over his career, including Science from 1980 to 1983. Dr Johnson received numerous national and international awards, including ones of which he became the first recipient. Among these were the first Association of British Neurologists Multiple Sclerosis Medal in 1986, the Smadel Medal from the Infectious Disease Society of America in 1986, the first Soriano Award from the World Federation of Neurology in 1993, and the first Pioneer Award from the International Society of Neurovirology in 1999. In 2011 he received the Medal for Scientific Achievement in neurology from the World Federation of Neurology. In 1987 he was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine (now called the National Academy of Medicine) of the National Academy of Sciences. After his retirement as department chair at Johns Hopkins in 1997, he served as director of the National Neuroscience Institute of Singapore and as Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Neurology. He received the Heritage Award from Johns Hopkins University. He also chaired several committees for the Institute of Medicine that studied transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, small pox vaccination, nervous system disorders in developing countries, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Richard Johnson's research has had an enormous impact on how viral infections are studied. His research was novel and had a major influence on academic medicine and the treatment of virus infections of the brain. One of the first patients with HIV at Hopkins was diagnosed by Dr Johnson because the disease had caused neurological disease. Dr Johnson mentored many generations of virologists, neurologists, immunologists, and neurovirologists who now lead research and patient care in these disciplines into the next millennium. Johnson's first wife, Frances, died in 2008. He is survived by his second wife, Sylvia Eggleston Wehr, associate dean for external affairs for Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, his daughter, Erica Johnson Meadows, a principal at a school in Kosovo, a son Carlton, a teacher in Florida, twin sons Matthew and Nathan, who are in finance in California, and 5 grandchildren. Nothing to report. Justin C. McArthur, MBBS, MPH, FAAN, FANA1 and Avindra Nath, MD2 1Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 2National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Bethesda, MD
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Dec 1, 2023
Carlos Hunte + 7
Open Access