Einstein Mourns the Death of Notable Hemoglobin Researcher, Dr. Ronald Nagel
Ronald Nagel, M.D., professor emeritus of medicine and of physiology and biophysics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and former chief of the unified division of hematology at Einstein and Montefiore, died on Saturday, April 16, following a prolonged illness.
![Ronald Nagel, M.D.]()
Ronald Nagel, M.D.
Ronald Nagel, M.D. Dr. Nagel was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1936. His mother was of Spanish and Araucanian Indian heritage; his father had emigrated to Chile from Bratislava, Slovakia. As a boy, Dr. Nagel attended schools in Chile, New York and Mexico, traveling widely because his mother was the cultural attaché for Chile for some years. He was the godson of the Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, who provided great inspiration for him, since he wrote poems himself throughout his life.
He attended medical school in Chile, graduating in 1960, and completed three years of post-graduate training, both as a resident in the Faculty of Medicine and as a student in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Chile. During that same period he published a number of papers, including two letters to Nature that touched upon population studies that would inform work later in his career.
Dr. Nagel returned to the United States in 1963 as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) international postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Helen Ranney, who had developed a major laboratory and clinical center to study hereditary disorders of hemoglobin—especially sickle cell disease—at Einstein. He first published a number of papers with Dr. Ranney on hemoglobin-haptoglobin interactions, and then began work with Dr. Ranney and fellow postdoc trainee Dr. Robert Bookchin on mutant hemoglobins. In the days before technology permitted site-directed mutagenesis, he and Dr. Bookchin published several papers mapping the inhibition of Hb S polymerization using naturally occurring mutations. The duo made major contributions to our understanding of the pathophysiology of and treatment for hemoglobinopathies—which are inherited disorders, such as sickle cell anemia and various types of thalassemia, in which there is abnormal production or structure of the hemoglobin molecule.
In collaboration with Dr. Mary Fabry, a former Einstein professor of medicine, Dr. Nagel described the physiology and pathophysiology of sickling of erythrocytes in patients with sickle cell disease based on the cells’ density. In collaboration with Dr. Silvio Baez and later Dr. Dhananjay Kaul, both former professors of medicine, Dr. Nagel confirmed the in-vitro findings he had made with Dr. Fabry in a unique in-vivo physiologic perfusion model, demonstrating that dense sickle cells had the greatest potential for adhering to vascular endothelium and initiating vaso-occlusive crises.
In a series of groundbreaking studies of multiple regions in Africa, Dr. Nagel demonstrated why patients from different areas of the continent manifested widely disparate clinical presentations based on genetic, region-specific hemoglobins and their density properties and adhesive tendencies. Over the years, his research group included Sandy Suzuka, as well as Drs. Anne Rybicki, Rhoda Hirsch, Edward Burns, Christine Lawrence and Henny Billett. In later years, as he explored gene therapy for thalassemia and transgenic mouse models of sickle cell disease, he also collaborated with Dr. Eric Bouhassira.
During his 45-year career at Einstein, Dr. Nagel rose through the academic ranks, receiving the appointment of full professor in 1978 and earning tenure in 1979. He also held numerous leadership roles, serving as director of Einstein’s heredity clinic from 1973 to 1980; director of hematology research from 1976 to 1978; director of experimental hematology from 1978 to1982; director of the division of hematology at Einstein from 1982 to 1984; and, finally, director of the unified division of hematology at Einstein and Montefiore from 1984 until his retirement in 2008. He also led Einstein’s NIH-funded Bronx Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center and oversaw a research program project aimed at investigating gene therapy for hemoglobinopathies. He published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and was author or co-author of five scientific books on hemoglobin, as well as two volumes of poetry.
He is survived by his wife, Marta Hallett, and their daughter Claudia, and by his first wife, Isabel Tellez, and their three children, Andrea, Pablo and Alexander; along with his grand-daughter, Siena.
Posted on: Tuesday, May 10, 2016