Pitt surgeon, researcher who pioneered treatment of breast cancer dies at 101
Bernard Fisher, a Pittsburgh native whose decades of groundbreaking breast cancer research made him a giant in the field of oncology, died Wednesday night. He was 101.
A distinguished service professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Dr. Fisher advanced the understanding of breast cancer and developed the implementation of large-scale, multi-institutional, randomized clinical trials.
“Bernard Fisher was a titan,” Arthur S. Levine, Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the medical school, said in a statement. “His research improved and extended the lives of untold numbers of women who suffered the scourge of breast cancer. His work overturned the dominant paradigm of cancer progression and, to the benefit of all, demonstrated the systemic nature of metastasis. This work offered us great insight into the biology of all cancer.
“He has been part of the University of Pittsburgh since the early 1940s — from undergrad to medical school and beyond — and we are proud to claim him as our own. But Dr. Fisher truly belongs to the world and we are grateful for his incalculable contributions to human health.”
Dr. Fisher’s research led him to challenge the idea that the best treatment for breast cancer patients was radical mastectomy, the removal of all breast and nearby tissues. Instead, his research at the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project provided a scientific basis for less extensive surgery.
Born Aug. 23, 1918, Dr. Fisher lived in Squirrel Hill most of his life and graduated from Pittsburgh Allderdice High School. He went to Pitt, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1940 and a medical degree in 1943.
After training as a surgeon, Dr. Fisher joined the medical school faculty as its first full-time member of the Department of Surgery.
Early in his career, he contributed to the development of
transplantation and vascular surgery; performed the first kidney transplant in Pittsburgh, in 1964; and led the university’s research in liver regeneration, transplant rejection and hypothermia.
Much of Dr. Fisher’s work revolved around his strong belief that evidence gathered through scientific inquiry should serve as the basis for advancing patient care.
Dr. Fisher’s focus only turned to cancer research after he attended a National Institutes of Health meeting in 1958, where participants organized groups for conducting clinical trials on breast and colon cancers. Following the meeting, Dr. Fisher became a founding member of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project.
Dr. Fisher led a study at the NSABP in 1971 that compared radical mastectomy with less extensive total mastectomy for women with primary breast cancer. In 1976, he launched a study that compared total mastectomy with less disfiguring lumpectomy, with or without exposure to radiation.
“Neither study showed a survival advantage from the more extensive procedure,” Pitt said in a news release. “Those studies provided a scientific basis for less extensive surgery.”
Dr. Fisher’s research also showed that adding chemotherapy or hormonal therapy to breast cancer treatment provided a survival advantage over surgery alone. Additionally, a 1992 trial to test tamoxifen as a breast cancer prevention agent showed that the drug helped women at higher risk of the disease.
Robert Ferris, director of the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, said in a statement that Dr. Fisher “created a paradigm of clinical research and hypothesis-testing only able to be accomplished across many institutions, demonstrating the power of collaboration . ... He always put the patient and the data first.”
Dr. Fisher served as chairman of the NSABP from 1967 to 1994, when he was forced to step down because of the furor caused by a Chicago Tribune report of falsifications in NSABP patient eligibility data committed by a Montreal surgeon.
Dr. Fisher’s staff had detected and reported the discrepancies to federal officials, but they were criticized for not publishing a reanalysis of their research even though the falsifications did not change the conclusions of NSABP’s research.
In 1994, he sued Pitt and several federal agencies because he believed he had been unlawfully removed.
In 1997, after it was determined that Dr. Fisher had done nothing wrong, Pitt officially apologized to him and settled the lawsuit out of court for $2.75 million. He also received $300,000 from the National Cancer Institute toward his legal fees.
Following the settlement, Dr. Fisher returned to the university as a professor and had access to NSABP research.
Dr. Fisher is survived by three children, Beth Fisher, Joseph Fisher and Louisa Rudolph, as well as five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Ralph Schugar Funeral Home is handling the arrangements.