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.

He read voraciously and had an outstanding memory. 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. Ideas, more than anything, were what Steve was about. Steve always employed terrific staff scientists who could help us translate his latest ideas into an experiment that could get done by lab meeting. He recruited a remarkably talented group of postdocs and students, many of whom have gone on to leadership in academia or industry. Working in the Schwartz lab was a wild ride. Long story short, I came to the UW for my residency training, and I later chose Steve's lab for my postdoctoral training. And his challenge that I needed to study the gene would not go away, because, of course, he was right. I would come home to messages on my answering machine, talking about a postdoc's discovery that vascular developmental programs were reactivated in disease. 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 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. 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'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”. I first met Steve when I interviewed for a pathology residency position in Seattle. Winning the Benditt Award later was one of his proudest achievements. Steve was one of NAVBO's first presidents, and he instituted the Society's Earl Benditt Award, recognizing outstanding research in vascular biology. 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.

Perhaps his most important contribution, however, was co-founding (with Michael Gimbrone) the North American Vascular Biology Organization. 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.

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. His PhD thesis involved endothelial cell turnover in healthy and injured blood vessels using 3H-thymidine autoradiography. 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. Never one for boundaries, Steve's residency and PhD training were performed simultaneously and ran seamlessly into his postdoctoral training. 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. After medical school, Steve moved to the University of Washington for residency training in Pathology. 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. 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.Ī native of Boston, Steve did his undergraduate work at Harvard University, followed by medical school at Boston University. 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.

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