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Obituary |
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Dr. Bennie Zak, whose career spanned the entire 50-year history of Clinical Chemistry, was a pioneer in our field and a beloved professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine, where he taught for more than 50 years.
Bennie Zak was the second of 4 children born to Lithuanian immigrant parents. His mother wanted him to be named Bernard, but with her thick accent it sounded like Bennie to the doctor at the Women’s Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, so Bennie it was.
After graduating from high school, Bennie was unable to afford college tuition, so he sold books to burlesque performers in Detroit while he tried to decide between boxing and comedy as career paths. The US Army Air Corps made his decision for him by drafting him in 1943. The Army trained Bennie as a navigator, an irony never lost on those of us who traveled—and became hopelessly lost—with him. When we reminded him of his training as a navigator, he countered that he was trained to navigate by the stars. I once opened my sunroof and said, "So navigate!" Bennie simply stated that the stars were different over Europe, where he had done his flying. That response was so typically Bennie: brief and to the point. Anything else would have been superfluous information and therefore not worth spending time on.
Bennie spent 16 months as a prisoner of war and was awarded the Purple Heart for injuries sustained in an exploding aircraft. On receiving his honorable discharge and after a prolonged 2-week courtship, he proposed to and later married Doris Selby in 1946. Bennie and Doris became the proud parents of Steven, Deborah, and Marsha.
Bennie began his postsecondary education under the GI Plan in 1945 and completed his doctorate in chemistry in 1952. His hospital service began when he became a research associate in medicine in 1950 and ended 41 years later, in 1991, when he was Division Head of Chemistry at Detroit Receiving Hospital. During this period he also consulted at Wm. Beaumont, St. John’s, Holy Cross, and the VA Hospitals, all in the Detroit area. In 1957 he joined the faculty at Wayne State University as assistant professor, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1959 and professor in 1963. In 1991 he became Professor Emeritus of Pathology and continued to go to his office 3 times a week until just before his death.
Between 1951 and 2000, Bennie published 227 papers, 50 chapters, 7 patents, and 116 abstracts, and he had 3 Citation Classics. The sheer volume of his writing is impressive, and a complete list of the subject matter of his works reads like the index of a clinical chemistry textbook. Bennie considered himself to be an analytical chemist working in the clinical laboratory; he often said that he preferred to make the tool for somebody else to use. He did not like the word "analyte"; he was quick to point out that in the clinical laboratory we seldom "analyze" anything, typically we "determine". Hence he coined his own word, "determinand", and used it in place of analyte; it was simply more consistent and more correct to him. A myriad of determinands caught his interest: magnesium, calcium, beryllium, gold, copper, iron, and zinc; phosphorous, chloride, and protein-bound iodine; creatinine, urea, bilirubin, proteins, estrogens, nucleic acids, ketosteroids, and haptoglobin; cholesterol, triglycerides, free fatty acids, and phospholipids; salicylates, barbiturates, thiobarbiturates, methotrexate, carbon monoxide, methanol, and ethanol; alkaline phosphatase, glucose-6-phosphatase, 5'-nucleotidase, cholinesterase, and creatine kinase. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bennie became particularly interested in developing reagents that were not subject to the interference caused by increased concentrations of triglycerides. Most people who knew him recognized his expertise with laboratory automation and its place in a well-run clinical laboratory. A full decade before anyone else used the phrase, the chemistry laboratory at Detroit Receiving Hospital was known, thanks to Bennie, as "random access".
In recognition of his accomplishments, Bennie won honors and awards as numerous as the determinands that occupied his attention, including the Faculty Research Award of Sigma Xi, Alpha Omega Alpha, Phi Lambda Upsilon, Sigma Xi, the Ames Award for Outstanding Contributions to Clinical Chemistry, a General Diagnostics Lectureship Award, the Distinguished Service Award of Wayne State University, and the Benedetti-Pichler Award of the American Microchemical Society. Every other year the AACC presents the eponymous Bennie Zak Award for Outstanding Research, Lipids and Lipoproteins Division, for contributions to the field of lipid analysis. Bennie served on the editorial boards of Clinical Chemistry, Analytical Biochemistry, and the Microchemical Journal and on the Board of Directors and Nominating Committee of the AACC.
Bennie was perhaps best known for the "Zak" cholesterol method; interestingly, he was neither the first nor the senior author on the paper that first described the ferric chloride–based reagent. Although few Zak cholesterols are performed anymore, Bennie’s handiwork is seen every day in laboratories and bathrooms around the world. As the story goes, Jerome Horwitz, of AZT fame, synthesized a new compound that proved to be of no use to him, but he thought it might be useful as a substrate for alkaline phosphatase. Horwitz passed it along to his friend Paul Wolf, who in turn passed it along to his friend Bennie Zak. Bennie took one look at the new compound and decided that it was totally useless for routine chemistry determinations because the product was not water-soluble. Bennie therefore passed it along to his friend Emmanuel Epstein to use in his disc gel electrophoresis of alkaline phosphatase. In 1967, the 4 of them published an article entitled "Indogenic Reaction for Alkaline Phosphatase in Disc Electrophoresis" in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology (1967;48:530). The hydrolysis product of the indogenic compound, brom-chlor-indoylphosphate, was adapted by others for use as an indictor—it produces the blue color in pregnancy and fertility tests. The mind boggles at how many pregnancy announcements these 4 men have been party to.
It is not unusual for graduate students to have strong dislikes for their advisors, but nothing could be farther from the truth in Bennie’s case; his students loved him dearly. Maybe it was because he would spend a week or two getting his slides in order for the "canned" lectures that he would give. Maybe it was because he always defended the students when they had issues with the school or other faculty members. Or maybe it was because he always had a joke for them. Perhaps it was because he would quietly watch them do things in the laboratory that were just plain wrong without saying a word until they came and asked for help. Maybe it was his generosity, like the time he gave Marie (Rock) Perlstein a pair of wheels and snow tires because he thought that they would fit her car. Maybe it was because he always made the student first author. Just maybe, it was because he made it his personal responsibility to find his students their first job. Or perhaps it was because he never asked for, nor did he ever expect, anything as simple as a thank you. Or maybe it was all of those things.
Bennie’s story would not be complete without a smattering of Bennie’s truisms—"Zakisms" if you will. In reference to comparison studies he liked to say, "If you have a yardstick and I have a yardstick, and we stand them beside each other to find that they are not the same length, it means one of three things. Yours is right and mine is wrong, or mine is right and yours is wrong, or we’re both wrong." In trying to get a manuscript published and the reviewers were being unfair or just plain foolish, he might comment, "Don’t waste your time with the [expletive deleted], we’ll go to another journal!" And my personal favorite, when trying to solve a problem, "If you stare at the knot hole long enough, you’ll see something that nobody else has ever seen."
In countless ways Bennie touched all of us in the profession, and we are all a little better for it. Those of us who knew him well were truly blessed.
Acknowledgments
The family would appreciate that donations in Bennie’s name be made to a charity of your choosing.
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