Med. School Researcher Dies at 63

Dr. Merton R. Bernfield, pediatrician, cell biologist and former chief of the division of newborn medicine at Children’s Hospital, died March 18 from complications related to Parkinson’s disease. He was 63.

His colleagues fondly remember Bernfield as a man who cared deeply about his work, but had a wide variety of interests as well.

“Mert was an inspiration in terms of his passion for science,” said Donald E. Ingber, a longtime friend and coworker. “He was enamored with science. But he was also very involved with his family and led a well-balanced life, with a great interest in theater and the arts.”

Bernfield was perhaps best known, though, for his research contributing to science’s current understanding of human tissue development.

In particular, he was fascinated by how the extracellular matrix—the jelly-like substance surrounding cells—affects intracellular processes. Much of Bernfield’s work involved the isolation and characterization of proteoglycans, proteins of the extracellular matrix with key roles in tissue development.

“He was one of the few people who thought that the extracellular matrix was important when most others thought it was a non-specific glue,” Ingber explained.

Bernfield attended the University of Illinois as an undergraduate and stayed on for his medical degree. He completed his pediatrics residency at the Cornell Medical Center in New York City.

In 1961 he was left without a lab to complete his postdoctoral work when the principal investigator of the lab he was planning to join at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) took a position in Boston.

He had to start over interviewing with other NIH researchers and, although he knew little about genetics, he impressed future Nobel Prize winning geneticist Marshall Nirenberg so much that Bernfield became a postdoctoral fellow in Niremberg’s lab.

In 1967 Bernfield accepted the post of chief pediatric resident at Stanford University. He conducted his research and headed several academic and research programs there over the next 22 years, including the Human Biology Project and the joint M.D.-Ph.D program.

He joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1989 as a professor of pediatrics and cell biology when he was recruited to direct the Joint Program in Neonatology.

Recently, Bernfield identified a specific proteoglycan, syndecan-3, which in mouse models appeared to play a role in controlling appetite.

Despite the increasing limitations of his Parkinson’s disease, Bernfield continued work late in his life.

In an interview featured in last June’s edition of the American Society for Cell Biology, he professed his love for life.

“I’m a lucky guy,” he said at the time. “They let me work with young, smart people. They still pay me for this. It’s amazing.”

Bernfield is survived by his wife Audrey Rivkin Bernfield and his three children, Susan, James and Mark.