Schilling Lecture topic: Immunology of injury

By Claire Dietz
HS News & Community Relations

Dr. John Mannick, Moseley distinguished professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and former chair of the Department of Surgery at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, will be on campus next week to deliver the seventh annual Helen and John Schilling Lecture for the UW Department of Surgery.

Mannick will speak on “The Immunologic Response to Injury” at 3:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 16, in Hogness Auditorium of the Health Sciences Center. A reception will follow the lecture.

Born and raised in Deadwood, South Dakota during the Depression, Mannick attended Harvard College and then Harvard Medical School, followed by an internship in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). After two years in the Air Force, he returned to MGH in the mid-’50s for residency training and developed an interest in the then-new field of organ transplantation immunology.

Before completing his surgical training, he spent a year as a National Institutes of Health research fellow working with Dr. E. Donnall Thomas in Cooperstown, N.Y. Thomas was later to come to the UW and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where he developed successful bone marrow transplantation, the work that brought him the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990.

Mannick was first a faculty member at the Medical College of Virginia, where he continued research on transplantation immunology and focused his clinical surgical skills on the emerging subspecialty of vascular surgery. He moved back to New England in 1964 and joined the Boston University faculty.

In 1973, he was appointed surgeon-in-chief at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, a position he held for the next 18 years, and Moseley professor at Harvard. Among his accomplishments was development of the surgical residency program there into one of the country’s leading training sites. Mannick has also continued to direct a basic research laboratory with continuous NIH funding for more than 20 years.

Among other honors, Mannick has been president for the Society for Vascular Surgery, the Society of Surgical Chairmen, the American Surgical Association, the International Society for Cardiovascular Surgery and the New England Society for Vascular Surgery.

Since he ended his clinical surgical practice in 1994, he has continued to direct his basic research laboratory and serves as president of the Society of Vascular Surgery’s Lifeline Foundation.

The lecture is named for the late Dr. John Schilling, who chaired the UW Department of Surgery from 1975 until 1983, and his wife. Helen Schilling established the endowed lectureship in honor of her husband, who died in 1999 at the age of 82.