The cardiologist who campaigned against nukes

Bernard Lown 1921–2021

Dr. Bernard Lown saved countless lives. In 1962, the Harvard cardiologist invented the first effective directcurrent defibrillator, administering a precisely timed electric jolt to correct abnormal heartbeats—and to restart stopped hearts. Two years later, he demonstrated how the local anesthetic lidocaine could also be used to control irregular heart rhythms; it became a standard drug treatment. But Lown’s work wasn’t confined to hospitals. Horrified by the public-health implications of the nuclear arms race, he joined with six American and Soviet doctors in 1980 to found International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). The group won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, by which time it had 135,000 members in 41 countries. “To me, you cannot be committed to health,” Lown said, “without being engaged in social struggle for health.”

Born Boruch Latz in Lithuania, he fled to the U.S. with his family in 1935 to escape “encroaching anti-Semitism,” said The Washington Post. Finding himself in Maine, the teenage Lown “taught himself English by memorizing the pages of a dictionary.” In 1945, he earned a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University, said The Boston Globe, from which he was briefly expelled after he intentionally broke hospital policy by using blood from black donors for white patients. Drafted to serve as a doctor during the Korean War, Lown refused to declare that he’d never joined a “subversive” organization, and “was dishonorably discharged, drafted again, and put to doing janitorial work at a military hospital.”

Lown rapidly climbed the ranks of academia and medicine, becoming a professor of cardiology at Harvard University and a senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

His involvement in the IPPNW led detractors to accuse him of playing into “the hands of Soviet propagandists,” said The New York Times. He dismissed such criticism as irrelevant considering the cataclysmic threat posed by nuclear weapons. “We are not indifferent to other human rights,” he said in accepting the Nobel. “But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others: the right to survival.”