Alexander Russell

Short abstract

Paediatrician who published the first descriptions of many metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases

Professor Alex Russell had three outstanding strands to his career. During the second world war, when he served in the Royal Air Force, he defined the syndrome of carbon monoxide poisoning in the gun cockpits at the rear of Whitley bombers, where space was confined. He showed that the poisoning accounted for air sickness that had previously been ascribed to “weakness of moral fibre” in veteran gunners. For this discovery and his field research in malaria and hepatitis he was mentioned twice in dispatches and was awarded the OBE.

Figure 1.

In 1950 he became assistant to Professor Sir Alan Moncrieff, working at both the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hackney Road, where he founded the UK's first paediatric endocrine, growth, and metabolic unit in 1951. He was appointed consultant paediatrician at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in 1954 and during the next 12 years published first descriptions of many metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases. Several of these syndromes are known throughout the world as the Russell syndromes. Alex was the first to describe an inborn enzymatic defect of the urea cycle (hyperammonaemia), which led to descriptions of patients with defects in every step of the cycle.

His appointment to the chair of paediatrics and childcare at the Hadassah-Hebrew University of Jerusalem gave Professor Russell opportunities to continue his previous work as well as influence the provision of heath care to whole populations. He founded and became director of the Jerusalem Community Centre for Child and Family Development and the Children's Hospital in Ramallah. His extensive clinical experience is reflected in his books The Cerebral Palsy Entities and The Peto System. He continued to write original articles—the last in 2001—and to advise colleagues throughout the world long after his official retirement.

He leaves a wife, Haya; two daughters; and six grandchildren.

Alexander Russell, emeritus professor of paediatrics and childcare Hebrew University of Jerusalem (b Newcastle upon Tyne 1914; q Durham 1936), died from heart failure on 4 March 2003.