The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Diane Drobnis Rosenberg. He had squamous cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer.
When Dr. Rosenberg decided to specialize in human genetics in the early 1960s, motivated by his detective-like experience diagnosing rare hereditary disorders in children, the field was barely existent. It was widely regarded as a niche, a small part of medicine – hardly worth it for an ambitious young physician-scientist.
“Medical genetics? There is no such field!” a nephrologist from Yale University told him.
Nevertheless, Dr. Rosenberg became a leading figure in what is now a vast field of study, conducting influential research into metabolic disorders and educating generations of scientists. In a five-decade career, he started at Yale, made a detour to the pharmaceutical industry, and spent nearly 20 years at Princeton University, teaching undergraduates and then reforming the high school science curriculum at Princeton Day School before joining retired in 2018.
“He was truly a visionary who recognized much, much, much earlier than almost anyone that genetics — and now genomics — would play a role in medicine that would stand on its own,” said his former doctoral student Huntington F. Willard, a geneticist and Chief Scientific Officer at Genome Medical. “Almost everything has at least some connection with genetics and genomics, and he saw that human genetics couldn’t be put under a different wing. It deserved to stand on its own.”
As he shuffled between the hospital and the lab, Dr. Rosenberg patients such as Robby, a comatose boy of 8 months. In the late 1960s, he diagnosed Robby with methylmalonic acidemia, or MMA — in which the body struggles to break down certain fats and proteins — and developed a new way to manage the condition through supplements of vitamin B12. . For decades, he continued to call Robby’s name and tell students the story of his former patient while declaring that clinical care and scientific research were inextricably linked.
“He was an extraordinary teacher,” said Harold T. Shapiro, a Princeton economist and former university president who helped Dr. Rosenberg for the school recruit. “He was tireless,” Shapiro added, “in his willingness to talk extensively with students” about careers in medicine.
Although he had a busy schedule, Dr. Rosenberg to periods of severe depression, which he revealed in a 2002 essay, “Brainsick,” which was published in Cerebrum magazine and an excerpt from the Baltimore Sun. Even counting some 300 scientific papers, it was arguably the most important he ever published, he said.
Like dr. Rosenberg revealed in the essay and in a self-published memoir, “Genes, Medicine, Moods,” he tried to treat his depression with Prozac before attempting suicide in 1998, around the time he began teaching at Princeton.
He was taken to the hospital by his wife and one of his daughters and was examined by one of his former Yale students, a doctor. “No one will believe that you, of all people, would try to take your own life,” the doctor told him.
dr. Rosenberg was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and said he began to understand that he was “brain sick” when he tried to commit suicide.
“I view my suicide attempt as the end result of mental illness in the same way I view a heart attack as the end result of coronary artery disease,” he wrote. “Both are potentially lethal, both have known risk factors, both are major public health problems, both are treatable and preventable, and both cause fear and grief. But the embarrassment associated with them is vastly different. Heart attack victims are comforted (‘Isn’t that a pity?’); suicide victims are cursed (‘How could he?’).”
Treated with electroconvulsive therapy and low-dose lithium, he said he was no longer depressed and found his professional productivity undiminished. With encouragement from his psychiatrist, his colleagues, and his wife, he began to speak openly about his diagnosis—the feeling, as his wife put it in a telephone interview, “that mental illness was being swept under the rug.”
Sometimes he presented his case histories to his students and brought some of them to tears as he discussed his suicide attempt and bipolar disorder.
“It makes no sense to allow stigma, whose underlying premise is that people with mental illness are weak, that the affected people don’t want to be diagnosed,” he wrote in the essay. “It’s time for me and other doctors to say so.”
Leon Emanuel Rosenberg, the second of three sons, was born on March 3, 1933 in Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up in the nearby town of Waunakee. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; his father owned a shop and his mother was a housewife.
“He told me his mother had a deformed thumb – she had an accident,” his wife said. “All his childhood he wanted to be a surgeon so he could fix it.”
dr. Rosenberg graduated summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin in 1954 and received his medical degree from the university in 1957, completing his internship at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. He spent six years at the National Cancer Institute, where he began treating children with rare genetic disorders, before joining Yale Faculty in 1965.
In 1972, he was the founding chair of the school’s department of human genetics. He later served as president of the American Society of Human Genetics, and in 1981 he made headlines when he defended abortion rights during a Senate subcommittee hearing.
Invited to testify about an anti-abortion law along with seven other doctors, Dr. Rosenberg was the only doctor to condemn the proposed legislation, according to a New York Times report. Reprimanding his colleagues, he said there was no scientific evidence that human life begins at conception and insisted that scientists who claimed otherwise had fallen prey to “personal bias.”
“Don’t ask science and medicine to help justify a ban on abortion, he told the commission, “because they can’t. Ask your conscience, your pastor, your priest, your rabbi, or even your God, because it is in their domain that this case is taking place.” The bill died before it reached the Senate floor.
From 1984, Dr. Rosenberg, dean of Yale’s medical school, where he led an institution of more than 900 full-time faculty members while raising money, recruiting professors and launching a new Bureau of Minorities Affairs, as part of his effort to increase the number of non-white students and teachers. at school. He left after seven years to become Chief Scientific Officer at Bristol-Myers Squibb.
The job offered him the opportunity to help develop new medical treatments and foster links between academia and the pharmaceutical industry. But he “didn’t find the corporate culture nearly as comfortable as that of academia,” he recalls in an autobiographical essay, “and barely managed to retire at 65.” He was soon hired at Princeton as a senior molecular biologist and professor.
dr. Rosenberg’s awards include the Kober Medal from the Association of American Physicians.
His marriage to Elaine Lewis ended in divorce. In 1979, he married Diane Drobnis, an editor for medical journals and textbooks, with whom he wrote his own textbook, Human Genes and Genomes.
In addition to his wife, from Lawrenceville, there are three children from his first marriage, Robert Rosenberg of Reading, Pennsylvania, Diana Clark of North Clarendon, Vt., and David Korish of San José, Costa Rica; a daughter from his second marriage, Alexa Rosenberg of Washington; a brother; six grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
Speaking to the American Society of Human Genetics after being elected president of the group, Dr. Rosenberg turns to his “tired, wary, and concerned” colleagues, with a little career and life advice:
“If your experiments aren’t working, or your grant deadline is approaching, or your patients seem ungrateful, don’t relieve yourself [your young colleagues]. Lock yourself in the closet, jog, complain to your partner, have a beer, but don’t scare the kids. Maybe they just take you seriously. If you have to tell it like it is, make sure you spend equal time with the privileges and pleasures of academic life, with the dazzling sense of well-being that follows a scientific discovery, and with the excitement that each of us knows that is beyond our current horizon.”