Dr. Charles Wilson — surgeon founded UCSF tumor center
Services will be held next week for Charles Wilson, a prolific neurosurgeon and researcher who founded the Brain Tumor Research Center at UCSF. He died Feb. 24 in Greenbrae at the age of 88.
Wilson, who worked at UCSF for 34 years, was known as a skilled surgeon who performed an astounding number of operations — sometimes simultaneously.
“At my peak, I was performing 15 a week. I had three operating rooms and would go from one to the other to the other,” Wilson told The Chronicle in 2011. “I had great teams and wonderful nurses. So I cranked those out.”
Wilson trained Mitchel Berger, now the chairman of the neurological surgery department at UCSF. Berger said that while his former mentor was known for the volume of his surgeries, it was Wilson’s precision that most impressed him.
“Unlike anybody else I’ve ever dealt with, he never wasted motion,” Berger said in an interview Saturday. “That’s the best way to describe it. When he did something, he did it with purpose and it meant something. It was like watching someone playing pool in which they thought six to 12 moves ahead.”
Wilson was born in 1929 in Neosho, Mo., a small town in the Ozarks, to parents who were childhood sweethearts. He attended Tulane University in New Orleans on both academic and football scholarships and went on to medical school there. He taught at medical schools in the South before eventually landing at UCSF in 1968 as chairman of the department of neurological surgery.
Soon after, he founded the pioneering Brain Tumor Research Center, one of the first of its kind.
“I think he put UCSF on the map,” Berger said. “He started the extremely renowned Brain Tumor Center here at a time in the ’70s when these centers didn’t exist, and nobody knew that much about brain tumors. He took it to a different level and created an infrastructure that was so unique.”
In 2000, Wilson cofounded the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance, a nonprofit that delivers health care services in Africa. Outside of work, he was devoted to fitness, running ultramarathons into his 70s.
He is survived by his wife, Francie Petrocelli; his daughter, Rebecca Cohn; son Byron Wilson; stepdaughter, Kathryn Petrocelli, and six grandchildren. He was predeceased by his son Craig Wilson.
A celebration of his life will be held at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere next Sunday at 2 p.m. There will also be a tribute to his life at UCSF at 8 a.m. March 29 in Room N-225 in the Nursing Building on campus.