The Renal Section of the American
Physiological Society is pleased to announce that Dr. Thomas E. Andreoli has been selected as the 2000 Robert W. Berliner/Abbott
Laboratories awardee. Dr. Andreoli will receive his Berliner/Abbott
Award during the Renal Dinner on Monday, April 17, 2000.
Dr. Andreoli, who was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, received
his BS from St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. His MD was
awarded magna cum laude from Georgetown University in 1960, and he went
on to an internship in Medicine at Duke University. Tom's training in
clinical medicine was interrupted by the Berlin crisis in 1961, but
this interruption gave him the opportunity to begin his research career
as a fellow in the laboratory of Rao Sanadi at the National Institutes
of Health (NIH), Gerontology Branch, in Baltimore, Maryland, where he
worked on mitochondrial biochemistry. He returned to Duke in 1963 and,
serving as Chief Resident, also entered the laboratory of Dan Tosteson,
then the Chair of the Department of Physiology, and began research in
the newly emerging field of transport in artificial lipid bilayer membranes. In the course of this work he was involved in the
characterization of valinomycin as the first chemically defined and
specific K+ transporter. In subsequent work in his own
laboratory, Tom and his co-workers established amphotericin B as a
model of a water-filled pore. Certainly, the biophysical rigor that Tom
applied to understanding these models of transporters laid the
foundation for his remarkable contributions to renal physiology.
In 1970 Tom moved to the University of Alabama at Birmingham as the
Director of the Renal Division, and his research interests turned to
the nephron, using the then new technique of isolated tubule perfusion.
Studies in the early 1970s with Jim Schafer, Susan Troutman Halm, and
Mary Lou Watkins led to the hypothesis that vasopressin-dependent water
transport across the apical membrane of the collecting duct involved a
water-selective channel and not a pore such as amphotericin B. Tom then
turned his attention to the problem of volume reabsorption in the
proximal tubule. Using a combination of mathematical modeling and
experimental approaches with the same collaborators, he advanced the
hypothesis that volume reabsorption is driven by transepithelial rather
than intraepithelial osmotic driving forces. After taking the Chair of
Internal Medicine at the University of Texas-Houston in 1979, Tom's
research concentrated on NaCl reabsorption in the thick ascending limb
of the loop of Henle. With his collaborators, including Steve Hebert,
Peter Friedman, Mike Culpepper, and Don Moloney, he identified the
mechanisms whereby vasopressin stimulated NaCl reabsorption in the
thick ascending limb. His most recent work at the University of
Arkansas, where he has been the Chair of Internal Medicine since 1987, has focused on the basolateral chloride channel in this segment. In
collaboration with Brian Reeves, Charles Winters, and Wisia Zimniak,
his laboratory has succeeded in cloning and characterizing this
channel. The fact that Tom has been continuously funded by the NIH for
over 30 years is certainly an enviable indicator of the high regard in
which his research is held.
Tom Andreoli also served as the first editor of this journal
(AJP-Renal) from the time the American Journal of
Physiology was sectionalized in 1976 until 1983. He was also the
editor of Kidney International from 1984 until 1997, and since
1983 he has been the editor of the Physiology in Medicine series, which
was originally published in Hospital Practice and has been
published in the American Journal of Medicine since 1997. This
series reflects so well Tom's belief in the synergy between the basic
and clinical sciences. Throughout his career, Tom has fostered such
collaboration, and he has received numerous teaching awards not only
because of his skill as a teacher but also because of his ability to
lead his students and fellows to apply information from the basic
sciences to the understanding of clinical problems. In recognition of
these qualities the American College of Physicians will award its
Distinguished Teacher Award to Tom at its annual meeting this year.
Among the numerous other honors Tom has received are the Homer Smith
Award (1993), the Louis Pasteur Medal of the Faculty of Medicine of the
Université Louis Pasteur (1995), the David Hume Award of the
National Kidney Foundation (1997), and the Robert H. Williams
Distinguished Chair of Medicine Award from the Association of
Professors of Medicine. He has been President of the American Society
of Nephrology (1993-1994) and is currently President of the
International Society of Nephrology.
The American Physiological Society Renal Section's Berliner/Abbott
Award Committee, a subcommittee of the Renal Section's Steering
Committee, included Steven Hebert (Editor, AJP-Renal); David
Pollock (Renal Section Student Awards Chairman); Glenn Reinhart (Abbott
Laboratories and Renal Section Liaison with Industry Representative); and Jeff Sands (Renal Section Chairma
n).
