Northwestern biochemist who studied blood clotting
Dr. Laszlo Lorand was a distinguished Northwestern University biochemist whose work focused on mechanisms of blood clotting.
Lorand, a Hungarian native, spent nearly 40 years working on Northwestern’s Evanston campus before moving in 1993 to the Feinberg campus in Chicago.
“He helped build a very distinguished group of biochemists (on the Evanston campus) and also helped build our department on our campus,” said Robert Goldman, chair of cell and molecular biology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Lorand, 95, died of natural causes Dec. 6 in the Glencoe home where he lived for nearly 50 years, according to his daughter, Dr. Michele Lorand.
He was born in Gyor, Hungary, in 1923. During World War II, his parents and other family members were sent to Auschwitz, where his father, a doctor, died. Lorand spent much of the war in hiding and in a labor camp run by one of his father’s former patients, his family said.
At war’s end, Lorand entered medical school at the University of Budapest, where he got a medical degree. In medical school he met Dr. Albert SzentGyorgyi, a Nobel Prize winner who offered him a position at the Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Budapest. It was there that Lorand first began to study blood coagulation and made his first discovery, laying the foundation for the molecular understanding of the clotting of fibrinogen in blood.
With the help of SzentGyorgi, Lorand got a passport. After learning that the passport was to be canceled, Lorand quickly left Hungary and made his way to England with only a letter of invitation to join a lab at the University of Leeds. He received a doctorate in biomolecular structure in 1952.
Lorand then received an invitation to come to the United States to take a position teaching physiology and pharmacology at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.
“He really benefited from the open arms of two different countries,” Michele Lorand said of her father’s welcome to England and the U.S.
Lorand remained concerned for other immigrants, she said. “He cherished his freedom and he cherished the fact that with freedom you get all sorts of intellectual freedoms too and that’s how things move forward,” his daughter said.
In the summer of 1953, he caught up with Szent-Gyorgi again at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. He returned there every summer for the rest of his life, studying blood clotting and what his daughter called the coagulation cascade, in part by studying clotting in lobsters.
Lobster blood, which turns blue when exposed to oxygen, is similar in some ways to human blood and is relatively easy to draw for study.
He came to Northwestern in 1955 and over the years was the author of more than 200 scientific publications, according to the university, His research in the area of thrombosis, protein associations and calcium ions is considered to have had a major impact in the field of blood coagulation.
His work included discovery of what was once the Laki-Lorand factor, now known as factor XIII or fibrin stabilizing factor, a protein that plays a critical role in blood clotting.
Lorand was instrumental in securing National Institutes of Health support for an extension to the Tech building on the Evanston Campus. He was the first director of an NIH-funded biochemistry training program and became a founding member of the department of cell and molecular biology.
Oksana Lockridge, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, who studied for her doctorate with Lorand in the 1960s, said he was an excellent mentor to graduate students. “He was very good at explaining what the project was about in his lab,” Lockridge said of weekly lab meetings in the days long before Google and the internet.
“It was really great that Dr. Lorand helped us understand the background for what we were doing in the lab.”
She added that Lorand also set an example for staying fit, often playing tennis on his lunch hour.
Lorand was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987.
“It’s a really important distinction,” Lockridge said. “I’m proud to say that my mentor is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.”
He was also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the recipient of numerous other awards and honorary degrees throughout his career, according to the University.
Northwestern honored Lorand with a scientific symposium in November of 2013. Lockridge said the meeting drew a number of Nobel laureates.
Lockridge, who studied with Lorand from 1965 to 1969, still remembers his advice as she was completing her doctorate. “He said ‘graduate school is just the beginning. You have to keep learning throughout your career.’ ”
Lorand lived that approach to learning. “His curiosity never ceased,” his daughter said. “I think that’s why he was such a great scientist.”
His wife, Joyce, died in 2010.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Private services are planned.