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Infectious Disease Pioneer Retires as Public Health Dean
Beasley led research to develop and establish worldwide use of life-saving vaccines
As an intern at the University of Washington in Seattle in the early 1960s, Palmer Beasley feared there were no more mountains to climb. He thought the world had passed him by - that all the infectious disease discoveries might have been made.
R. Palmer Beasley, M.D., is retiring after
17 years as dean of the UT School of
Public Health at Houston.
Photo by Dennis Meyler
"I was in medical school looking at small pox, polio, measles and all the other diseases for which vaccines were being developed and control measures established," Beasley recalls. "And I said, 'It's all gonna be over; it's done!'"
But that was hardly the case for the man who retires this month as the dean of The University of Texas School of Public Health at Houston.
R. Palmer Beasley, M.D., has become a medical pioneer for his groundbreaking work on hepatitis B virus (HBV) and liver cancer. During his long career as an epidemiologist, he also has worked on everything from HIV/AIDS, rubella, plague and rheumatoid arthritis to diarrhea/gastroenteritis. Recently, he fought the outbreak of SARS in Taiwan and China. In addition, he organized and led a task force of UT Health Science Center at Houston experts to assist the Taiwan government's special Anti-SARS Task Force.
It was in Taiwan that Beasley found the opportunity to begin to make the world a healthier place. As a faculty member at the University of Washington, Beasley visited Taiwan during a major rubella epidemic and led field trials that established the successful vaccine for rubella, now in worldwide use.
Later, in Taiwan, he discovered he had "landed in the epicenter of a hepatitis epidemic that had gone on for decades. I was left wondering why some places are affected so badly with this. How is this virus transmitted? Infectious diseases loomed very large as the mountain to climb in public health 40 years ago. I was naïve, but at that point I thought hepatitis was the last remaining major infectious disease. It was causing many deaths, and seemed to represent the most important infectious disease for which there were no answers at that point."
Conventional wisdom at that time was that hepatitis B virus transmission was limited to blood transmission or dirty injection equipment. But Beasley rejected that assumption. How is blood transmitted to people in real life, he asked himself. The answer: From mother to child.
"We set up a study to test my theory," he said. Laboratory findings successfully proved his hypothesis that transmission of the virus occurred between mother and child. It also led to Beasley's suspicion - and eventual proof - that hepatitis B caused liver cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer death in the world.
That first big finding led to others, including creation of a hepatitis B vaccine that has been adopted by more than 80 countries. Beasley convinced the World Health Organization to add HBV vaccine as the seventh vaccine in the global immunization program, saving the lives of millions worldwide.
During his 14 years in Taiwan, Beasley met and fell in love with fellow researcher Lu-Yu Hwang, M.D., a pediatrician-epidemiologist. They were married in 1980, and today she is an associate professor in epidemiology at the School of Public Health and the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston. Their 15-year-old daughter is now a sophomore at Episcopal High School in Houston.
The couple moved to Houston in 1987, when Beasley was recruited to become the second dean of the School of Public Health.
In the early 1990s he visited Bombay, India, where the School of Public Health had established an HIV program. This year he visited Bangkok and Taiwan and spent a week in India as an advisor helping to establish the country's first school of public health.
"Dr. Beasley's academic and educational accomplishments in the field of public health, as well as his scientific contributions to society, are enormous," James T. Willerson, M.D., president of the UT Health Science Center at Houston, said when Beasley's retirement was announced earlier this year. "He truly epitomizes global public health."
Beasley has received four prestigious international awards: the 1985 King Faisal International Prize in Medicine, the 1987 Charles S. Mott General Motors Prize for Research on Cancer, the 1999 Prince Mahidol Award for Medicine in Thailand and the 2001 Health Medal of the First Order in Taiwan.
Beasley, 68, earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College, his M.D. at Harvard Medical School, and his master's degree in preventive medicine at the University of Washington.
His retirement as dean at the end of the year coincides with the completion of his two-year term as national chairman of the Association of Schools of Public Health. But he doesn't plan to stop working. Beasley plans to exit the dean's office, take a sabbatical and return to the school as a faculty member and dean emeritus. He will continue his research and consulting work on public health programs, particularly in the field he has pioneered for so many years, infectious diseases.
By Liz Bennett