Doctor helped kids grow

Robert M. Blizzard, a pediatric endocrinologist who forged a new medical frontier by using hormones to boost the height of thousands of children, died Sunday at his home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 94.

Dr. Blizzard, who achieved global renown in his field and was long associated with the University of Virginia School of Medicine, liked to say that he had helped add 11 miles of height to the U.S. population. He was referring not only to his own patients but also to those helped by a national agency he founded that increased the amount of height-promoting hormone available.

Many of the recipients had been told that they would never reach 4 feet, but with hormone shots they climbed to upward of 5 feet, 3 inches.

That success, ballyhooed in the news media, was tainted years later when some doses of human growth hormone were linked to a fatal brain disease, leading the federal authorities to ban the use of the substance when derived from cadavers — a move Dr. Blizzard had come to endorse — and the introduction of a successful synthetic version.

“The growth-hormone story is so important, and he was one of the pioneers,” said Thomas P. Foley Jr., emeritus professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Blizzard also conducted landmark studies exploring the development of autoimmune thyroiditis, when the body attacks its own thyroid, Dr. Foley said, and he treated children born with disorders of sexual development, when genitals do not look typically male or female.

Dr. Blizzard was an audacious experimenter. In 1956 he injected a toddler, who had stopped developing, with growth hormone derived from a cow. But the child, a girl, did not grow.

For Dr. Blizzard, the experiment’s failure proved that animal hormone does not work in humans. It fueled a race to extract growth hormone from humans, who were assumed to be a better match. While his conclusion was correct, years later he would discover that the girl in the study had suffered from a syndrome that made her body resist growth hormone, even the human kind.