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Professor Martin I. Rubin: A Personal Remembrance

(dbruns{at}clinchem.aacc.org)

Professor Martin I. Rubin: A Personal Remembrance

I feel privileged to write this personal obituary for Prof. Martin Rubin, as he had such a profound and positive influence on my life.

I first met Prof. Rubin when he visited the Laboratory at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith Hospital in London, where I was working as a young biochemist with a Masters degree. He was very impressed with the extent of automation that the laboratory had even in those early years of automation. When he asked me if I would like to come to the United States for a year, to supervise and overhaul the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory at the Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC, I jumped at the possibility of this unique opportunity.

As my year at Georgetown was coming to its end, Prof. Rubin urged me to apply to the Department of Biochemistry at the Medical School to do a Doctorate in Biochemistry. I was reluctant to do so for several reasons: I was unaccustomed to the American ways of teaching and testing, and I wanted to return to the United Kingdom to resume my planned career there. Prof. Rubin said that this would be a waste of my abilities, and the next day, he appeared with the Graduate School application papers for me to fill out, warning me that the deadline for submission of the application was 2 days hence. He more or less forced me to apply and said, "Let’s see if you get accepted". I went for my interview, which was extremely challenging. The professor of biochemistry who conducted the interview has now been my husband for many years.

It is difficult for me to accept that this person who had such a profound influence on my life, both professionally and personally, is now gone. As you will see from the highlights of his career, which I describe below, some aspects of his career must have "rubbed off" on me: he was determined, as I am, to help developing countries improve their laboratory medicine, and he was a president of the IFCC, as I am now.

Jocelyn M.B. Hicks

President, IFCC

Washington, DC

Martin I. Rubin (1916–2006)

Martin I. Rubin, a Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center, who helped promote the field of clinical chemistry as a formal discipline, died on March 24, 2006, at age 90, at his home in Chevy Chase, MD.

Prof. Rubin, who worked at Georgetown from 1948 to 1981, was director of the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory at the University Hospital for most of his career; he also taught certain aspects of biochemistry at the medical, graduate, and dental schools of Georgetown.

Early on, Prof. Rubin introduced the use of bar coding of patient specimens to avoid lost or mislabeled specimens.

In the clinical chemistry laboratory, he performed fundamental research on the science of chelation to remove toxic heavy metals from the body. Prof. Rubin became a strong advocate for using the chelating agent EDTA for such purposes, particularly for treatment of lead poisoning. More contemporaneously, he supported the rigorous study of using EDTA for treatment of atherosclerosis and plaque in the body. US Food and Drug Administration approval of such use is still pending.

Prof. Rubin was a native of Brooklyn, NY, and a 1936 graduate of the City College of New York, then an illustrious science institution. He received a PhD in chemistry from Columbia University in 1942. He began his career as a research chemist at Wallace and Tierman Products, Inc., in New Jersey, working on the development of Desonex and other fungicides.

Prof. Rubin’s presidency of the IFCC lasted from 1967 to 1973. In that role, he was credited with increasing the number of member countries from 17 to 42. He also founded the Latin American Federation of Clinical Chemistry and lectured at professional forums from Ecuador to Australia. He also consulted for the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and the US Department of Justice. He was also a board member of the AACC and a co-founder of the DC chapter. He wrote and edited widely in his field.

His family, friends, and colleagues have lost an important person in their lives.

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