Dr. Robert Spencer Lees died on Monday, June 5 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 82. A resident of Brookline, he was also a part-time resident of Chilmark for 40 years.
He had a long and distinguished career in academic medicine. He was a cardiologist on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital for 50 years, as well as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Harvard-MIT Joint program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST). His devotion to his patients and his remarkable skill at keeping them alive and happy for many years were widely admired and appreciated. He made several valuable clinical and research discoveries and was an advisor to students at MIT and HST.
Dr. Lees was born on July 16, 1934, in the Bronx, N.Y. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1955, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; he graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1959. He began his medical career as an intern in surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In July 1960, he married Ann Mirabile Lees, a 1961 graduate of Harvard Medical School, his wife of 56 years, and a long-time research colleague. At the same time, he began a year as a clinical and research fellow in medicine in the newly opened Arteriosclerosis Unit at MGH. There he developed a practical method for improving the diagnosis of patients with high blood lipids, the first research achievement in his long career focusing on the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of arteriosclerosis.
In the following two years, he was an assistant resident in medicine at MGH and then a fellow at the National Heart Hospital in London.
From 1963 to 1966, he served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service at the National Heart Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. There he demonstrated the widespread value of the diagnostic tool he had developed at the MGH Arteriosclerosis Unit.
From 1966 to 1968 he was an assistant professor at the Rockefeller University in New York City. While there, he treated two young women who each had a double dose of bad genes for high blood cholesterol. Such patients are unable to respond to any standard treatments and they ordinarily die from coronary artery disease in their teens or early twenties. Dr. Lees developed a novel treatment to remove lethal cholesterol from the patients’ plasma. After six months of the treatment, a form of plasmapheresis, there was a marked improvement in both patients. The experiment led to a machine that is still in use to extend productive lives for patients with dangerously high cholesterol who do not respond to drugs.
When he became director of the MIT Clinical Research Center in 1969, Dr. Lees began treating two other patients who had a double dose of high blood cholesterol genes. Treatment for one of them started when she was 16. She lived to her early 50s. The other patient, whom Dr. Lees first met when she was three years old, is still happily alive at the age of 51.
Also at MIT, Dr. Lees collaborated with a professor of mechanical engineering to develop a machine that analyzed the sound waves made by blocked carotid arteries, which are located in the neck and deliver blood to the brain. The non-invasive technique used a microphone placed on the neck which sent the sound of blood flow in a blocked artery to a computer that determined how narrow the artery had become. The technique was called phonoangiography. It could measure carotid arterial narrowing to within one millimeter.
From 1973 to 1982, he was the first director of the Noninvasive Diagnostic Lab at MGH, where ultrasound was used to locate atherosclerotic plaques.
Another long-standing project was to find a way to locate atherosclerotic lesions by using compounds with a short-lived radioactive label attached. A promising element of this work was the discovery of a previously unknown protein in the artery wall. The protein, christened atherin, binds low-density lipoproteins, the carriers of blood cholesterol, so tightly in the artery wall that the binding is believed to lead to atherosclerotic plaques.
From 1982 to 1991, Dr. Lees undertook clinical and research work at the New England Deaconess Hospital where he was the director of medical research; after that, the work continued at the nonprofit Boston Heart Foundation in Cambridge, an organization that Dr. Lees founded and directed from 1991 until his retirement in December 2004.
Dr. Lees was a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the Council on Arteriosclerosis of the American Heart Association. He was also a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation; a member of the Metabolism Study Section of the National Institutes of Health, which he chaired from 1978 to 1980; the MIT Premedical Advisory Committee; and several other committees at MIT and Harvard Medical School. He co-founded two companies, Diatide and Atherex. He had many scientific publications and patents.
In addition to his wife, Ann, Dr. Lees leaves his son David, daughter in law Pamela LePage, and their son, Garrett, of Palo Alto, Calif.; his daughter Sarah Lees of Tulsa, Okla.; his daughter Martha Lees, his son in law Paul Sonn, and their children, Rebecca and Noah, of Brooklyn N.Y.; his son Steven, daughter in law Carolyn Akinbami, and their children, Peter and Benjamin, of Seattle, Wash., a brother, Richard of Washington, D,C,, two nieces, two nephews, and two great-nephews.
A graveside service at Abel’s Hill Cemetery in Chilmark was led by Rabbi Caryn Broitman.