In Memoriam: William H. Daughaday, MD (1918–2013)

Dr William H. Daughaday, the 51st President of The Endocrine Society, died at age 95 on May 3, 2013. His contributions to endocrinology and to the Society were wide-ranging and numerous, not the least of which was the large cohort of physicians attracted to fundamental and clinical endocrine research by his enthusiasm, energy, and overwhelming intellectual curiosity.

Dr William H. Daughaday as a senior faculty member at Washington University School of Medicine.

Bill Daughaday grew up in greater Chicagoland and attended Harvard College. There he was captain of the wrestling team and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation from Harvard Medical School in 1943, where he was selected for the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society, he served in the Army as a medical officer for 20 months during the latter part of World War II and then returned stateside to continue his clinical and scientific training, initially with Robert H. Williams at Boston City Hospital. In 1947, he moved to Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis as an Assistant Resident in Medicine at Barnes Hospital. He joined the laboratory of Carl and Gerty Cori in 1949 as a Research Fellow and began to investigate the metabolic actions of GH on isolated rat diaphragm. Despite the failure of these studies to explain the (even then) well-known anti-insulin effects of GH, this apparently unpromising exploratory project set into motion a life-long interest in all things GH (1).

In 1951, Bill Daughaday formed his own research laboratory and became head of a new Metabolism Division in the Department of Medicine at Washington University (he was acting head in 1950), which he continued to lead for the next 34 years. Under his guidance, the Metabolism Division developed into one of the premier endocrinology units in the country, known for high-level research productivity and superb scientific training, as evidenced by the dozens of former fellows who have occupied leadership positions in academic medicine throughout the world. This drive for excellence was amplified by combined clinical and research activities with the Division of Bone and Mineral Metabolism at neighboring Jewish Hospital of St Louis and with the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism at St Louis Children's Hospital. The environment nurtured by Bill guaranteed that trainees learned to present ideas and supporting data thoughtfully and to deal effectively with critical questioning.

Bill Daughaday was a vigorous scientific citizen. In addition to his tenure as President of The Endocrine Society, he served on advisory groups for the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health, and for the Food and Drug Administration, and was Editor for several journals, including the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. He also was a respected clinician and teacher and chaired the first panel on endocrinology and metabolism for the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Although his scientific interests and accomplishments spanned many areas of endocrinology and metabolism, Bill Daughaday is most remembered for his seminal ideas about the mechanisms by which GH promotes growth. His demonstration in 1957 of the indirect effects of GH on extracellular matrix biosynthesis in cartilage, subsequently formulated as the somatomedin hypothesis of GH action, opened an entirely new scientific field. These fundamental studies not only led to the later characterization of the insulin-like growth factors, IGF-1 and IGF-2, to the IGF binding proteins, and to the GH and IGF receptors, but also have continued to invigorate clinical, translational, and basic endocrine research to this day. In addition, his investigations into human growth disorders helped to define GH-insensitivity syndromes, and set the stage for the discovery by others of genetic defects in the GH receptor in growth-deficient children and, more recently, the characterization of inherited mutations in several components of the GH receptor-initiated signal transduction cascade. Studies by Bill and his colleagues on tumor hypoglycemia also led to the recognition that a proform of IGF-2 (“big IGF-2”) often was the responsible agent in this paraneoplastic syndrome.

For these accomplishments and other contributions to biomedical research, Bill Daughaday was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the Institute of Medicine and received the Fred Conrad Koch Award of The Endocrine Society. But perhaps his most enduring legacy is reflected in a statement that he wrote about another physician-scientist, of being “a member of a small group of clinical endocrinologists who applied the new knowledge in hormone structure that arose in the middle decades of [the last] century to the definition of important syndromes of hormone deficiency and excess” (2). Bill himself was one of the “iron men of those days” (1), who defined and shaped the great endocrine research problems for the rest of us. We, his colleagues and the entire endocrine community, will miss him.