Medical researcher who studied blood platelets
Gustav Born, an accomplished medical researcher who was the son of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and also was a witness to the expulsion of famed scientists from Nazi Germany, died April 16 in Britain, where he lived. He was 96.
His death was announced by the William Harvey Research Institute, which Dr. Born helped found. No cause of death could be learned.
Known for his work on blood clotting, Dr. Born was a member of an accomplished family: In studying medicine he followed in the footsteps of a grandfather; another family member is his sister’s daughter, singer Olivia Newton-John.
As the son of Max Born, recognized as a founder of modern physics, and of quantum theory in particular, Dr. Born met many of the luminaries of 20th-century science while growing up in Göttingen, Germany, one of Europe’s leading scientific and academic centers.
He recalled lying under a piano and hearing the music played by one of his father’s colleagues, the Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg.
He knew J. Robert Oppenheimer, who studied in Germany with Dr. Born’s father and later became the leader of the Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory that built the first atomic bomb.
“He was quite reserved,” Dr. Born told an interviewer from the University of Göttingen in 2011. “Slightly formal.”
Once, when the family was in Britain during World WarII, Dr. Born recalled that he was sent by his father to a London hotel to deliver a letter to Niels Bohr, another Nobel laureate and a principal figure in the creation of quantummechanics.
Bohr was on his way to Los Alamos and was traveling under an assumed name. In the letter, Max Born said he would have nothing to do with research on an atomic bomb.
Dr. Born’s father, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954, came from a Jewish family but later became a practicing Lutheran. Nevertheless, under the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis, his father’s academic career became circumscribed.
Dr. Born remembered his parents discussing what they should do. One friends who offered advice was Albert Einstein. In an interview, Dr. Born recalled that Einstein said, “Leave at once.”
On May 10, 1933, Dr. Born, then 11, and his parents left their home in Göttingen. From the train, Dr. Born said, they witnessed an incident in which books were being burned. As he recalled it, his father became indignant and wished to intervene. Fortunately, Dr. Born said, “My mother held him back.”
They went eventually to Britain, where Dr. Born trained as a surgeon, graduating from medical school at the University of Edinburgh while still in his teens. One reason he became a physician, he recalled, was that his father told him that in wartime, “You will not have to kill people.”
As a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, Dr. Born was among the first allied medical personnel to witness the health consequences of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
The bleeding disorders that he saw in Japan steered him toward medical research that he followed throughout his career. He made several important discoveries about blood flow and clotting, with applications to heart disease.
Among other innovations, Dr. Born was credited with developing a device that measured the speed of the potentially dangerous clumping of blood platelets. The platelets were said to aggregate, and the device was knownas an aggregometer.
Dr. Born also played a key role in developing the idea, now widely accepted, that such drugs as aspirin could prevent or mitigate the clumping of cells that can cause a dangerous thrombosis. Much of his research was done with John Vane, who received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1982.
Gustav Victor Rudolf Born was born July 29, 1921, in Göttingen. His family’s departure from their longtime home was not easy. His parents, he said, “hated to be uprooted in this crude and dangerous way.”
After his wartime service, Dr. Born held research positions and received a second doctorate, from the University of Oxford, in 1951. He was a lecturer at Oxford before serving as a professor of pharmacology at the Royal College of Surgeons in London from 1960 to 1973. He later held prominent academic chairs in pharmacology at the University of Cambridge and King’s College London. In the late 1980s, he helped found the William Harvey Research Institute in London.
His marriage to Ann Plowden-Wardlaw ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife since 1962, the former Faith Maurice-Williams, who is also a doctor; three children from his first marriage; and two children from his second marriage.
Dr. Born had many interests outside of science and was a skilled amateur flutist. A son, Sebastian Born, is a former associate director of London’s National Theatre; a daughter, Georgina Born, is a professor of music and anthropology at Oxford.
In recent years, Dr. Born was active in trying to help refugee scholars from the Middle East.
He was also deeply aware that he was among the last people who could bear personal witness to a halcyon era of physics in the early 20th century, before Germany’s civic order broke down under Nazi rule.
“I’m sad,” he said five years ago in a BBC interview, “that it almost ends with me.”