Updated April 7
Harvard honors the life of Nobel Peace Prize winner Bernard Lown
The 99-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who died in February was hailed in an online celebration of his life.
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A Harvard-sponsored remembrance of Dr. Bernard Lown on Wednesday recalled the Lewiston High School graduate and Nobel Peace Prize winner as a man who built bridges among people the world over to create a healthier, safer life for everyone.
Lown, who died in February at the age of 99, invented the defibrillator – a device that has saved many lives – and championed the effort to abolish nuclear weapons while promoting numerous initiatives to foster better health from his perch as a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
Bernard Lown, whose lifeâs work spanned from pivotal breakthroughs in medicine to humanitarian efforts against nuclear war that won him the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, died at age 99.
Lown died Feb. 16 of complications from congestive heart failure, according to his son Fredric Lown, after a decades-long academic career serving as a professor of cardiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a physician at Brigham and Womenâs Hospital. Lown is survived by his three children, Fredric, Anne, and Naomi. His wife, Lousie Lown, died in 2019.
âHe was a force of nature,â said longtime colleague Joseph D. Brain, a professor of environmental physiology at HSPH.
In memoriam: Bernard Lown, innovative cardiologist, antiwar activist
February 18, 2021 – Bernard Lown, a beloved emeritus faculty member and mentor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, died on February 16, 2021 at his home in Chestnut Hill, Mass. He was 99.
Lown’s was a life devoted to the health and well-being of people around the world, from his innovative work in the field of cardiology to his tireless advocacy against the catastrophic threat of nuclear war. He retired from Harvard Chan School in 2000 as a professor of cardiology emeritus, but remained a vital part of the life of the School through the training program established in his name.Lown had a sense of moral urgency to remedy the world’s wrongs since he left Lithuania at age 14 with his Jewish family to avoid Nazi persecution. It informed his work as a cardiologist, which focused on preventing sudden cardiac death, one of the most common causes of death in the United States. He pushed the field forward t