The scientific world lost a larger-than-life figure with the passing of Stephen Schwartz, MD, PhD on March 17, 2020, at age 78 from complications of COVID-19 infection. I will say at the beginning that Steve was my mentor and a hugely influential person in my scientific development, so this tribute will be more personal than scholarly.
A native of Boston, Steve did his undergraduate work at Harvard University, followed by medical school at Boston University. During this time he studied with two pioneering cell biologists and electron microscopists at Harvard, Keith Porter and Guido Majno, fostering a lifelong passion for biological structure and its relationship to cellular function. After medical school, Steve moved to the University of Washington for residency training in Pathology. Excepting a brief stint in Long Beach, CA with the Navy during the Viet Nam War, he remained in Seattle at the UW for the rest of his life. Never one for boundaries, Steve's residency and PhD training were performed simultaneously and ran seamlessly into his postdoctoral training. He did both his PhD and postdoctoral training with Earl Benditt, chair of Pathology at the UW, on vascular biology and tissue response to injury. His PhD thesis involved endothelial cell turnover in healthy and injured blood vessels using 3H-thymidine autoradiography.
When Steve opened his lab in 1973, vascular biology was not yet a “thing”, and he helped to organize this nascent field through the Blood Vessel Club, an informal gathering of vaso-curious scientists who met during the annual FASEB conference. After serving as president of the Blood Vessel Club, Steve went on to chair the Atherosclerosis Gordon Conference and to serve as the founding co-chair (with Paul DiCorleto) of the Vascular Biology Gordon Conference. Perhaps his most important contribution, however, was co-founding (with Michael Gimbrone) the North American Vascular Biology Organization. Since its founding in the 1990s, NAVBO has grown to more than 1500 members and is the world's premier society dedicated to blood vessel biology. Steve was one of NAVBO's first presidents, and he instituted the Society's Earl Benditt Award, recognizing outstanding research in vascular biology. Winning the Benditt Award later was one of his proudest achievements.
I first met Steve when I interviewed for a pathology residency position in Seattle. I'd had a reasonably successful PhD project in cardiac physiology, but Steve dismissed it as “work from a dying profession, done by people who run around with wires and resistors”. When I sputtered in protest, he said “You need to come to Seattle, where we study the gene and its regulation, or you will never be successful in modern biology”. I finished the interview trip convinced of two things: the UW thought I was an idiot, and this was the most infuriating person I'd ever met. But then a strange thing happened. I began to get scientific papers faxed to the internal medicine wards where I was rotating, with Steve's handwritten notes saying things like “This is why injured vessels heal in layers”. I would come home to messages on my answering machine, talking about a postdoc's discovery that vascular developmental programs were reactivated in disease. And his challenge that I needed to study the gene would not go away, because, of course, he was right. Long story short, I came to the UW for my residency training, and I later chose Steve's lab for my postdoctoral training.
Working in the Schwartz lab was a wild ride. It was big, well-funded, and chaotic. He recruited a remarkably talented group of postdocs and students, many of whom have gone on to leadership in academia or industry. Steve always employed terrific staff scientists who could help us translate his latest ideas into an experiment that could get done by lab meeting. Ideas, more than anything, were what Steve was about. He pursued new ideas with manic energy. He slept little, often calling lab members or colleagues in the middle of the night to ask what they thought of his new idea or a paper he was reading. He read voraciously and had an outstanding memory. This made him a difficult person with whom to argue, because he had a seemingly photographic memory of the last thirty years of cell biology. And argue he did, with anyone who came into his sphere of influence. No topic was off limits, spanning science, feminism, race, class, sex, religion, university politics, food, fine arts, literature or whatever else was on his mind. His style was polemical, and opponents who did not to stand their ground were summarily dismissed. But if you stood up to him with logic and surprised him with knowledge, his respect grew, and he welcomed you one step closer into his intellectual circle. Steve wrote beautifully, and he wrote with astonishing speed, often drafting a 25-page NIH grant in just a few days. He was a go-to person if you needed help with your grant proposal, typically returning an intensively marked up document in just 24 h. His criticisms were blunt, mostly correct, and he never pulled punches, believing that only truly good ideas stand up to harsh criticism.
In his later years, Steve focused on theoretical biology and training the next generation of scientists. He was an early adopter of genomic technology and believed that computational biology was the way of the future. He emphasized that interdisciplinary science would lead to the real breakthroughs, eschewing colleagues who spent entire careers in single, reductionistic systems. Steve ran a longstanding cardiovascular training grant that, at its peak, carried 15 predoctoral and postdoctoral scientists. He used this training program to bring some of the world's best scientists to Seattle, making sure that trainees met each speaker and had opportunities for career advice. He also created a vascular biology boot camp course, VASCULATA, designed to teach cutting edge science to trainees. Steve cared deeply about social and economic justice, and this included working tirelessly to promote the entry of underserved minority populations into cardiovascular biology.
The best way to honor a complex person like Steve may be to take the best of him and try to pass it on to the next generation. His mercurial nature always made him hard to pin down, but a few things stand out. First, Steve Schwartz was a champion of scientific truth and believed that seeking it was our highest calling. He hated simple explanations for difficult problems, thinking that biology was more of an overgrown thicket than a manicured garden. He believed Einstein's maxim, that imagination is more important than knowledge. He had a playful side, and he loved both children and toys; this affection carried over into his development of the next generation of scientists and their technologies. He balanced the energy he put into science with many activities outside of the lab, including photography, travel, blogging, and sailing his beloved Tollycraft trawler, on which he, his wife Barbara, and their children Havi and Hillel spent many happy hours. These are worthy, timeless attributes, and if we can adopt them, they will make us better scientists and people.
Steve Schwartz holding forth at a recent symposium at the University of Washington.