University Times

Long-time Pitt School of Medicine professor Jessica Helen Lewis, an internationally recognized expert on blood coagulation and hemophilia, died Aug. 21, 2003, in Bangor, Maine. She had suffered a heart attack a week before her death at age 86.

At Pittsburgh’s Central Blood Bank, Lewis served at various times from 1969 to the late 1980s as director of research, medical director and senior vice president. She co-founded the Hemophilia Center of Western Pennsylvania, which she directed from 1973 to 1981. As a researcher, Lewis was best known as an expert on comparative coagulation systems in animals.

In his memoir “The Puzzle People,” transplant pioneer Thomas Starzl said Lewis was invaluable to surgeons in the early days of liver transplantation as chairperson of Pitt’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), a federally mandated group that oversees medical experimentation.

In the early 1980s, Starzl wrote, Lewis as Pitt’s IRB chairperson was responsible for a compromise that limited randomized trials involving the then-controversial new anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine, to good-risk kidney transplant recipients (who could be returned to artificial kidney support if the grafts were rejected).

The ensuing trials satisfied FDA officials, validated cyclosporine’s superiority over other anti-rejection drugs that would have resulted had the trial been extended to high-risk liver and heart transplants, according to Starzl. “Jessica Lewis’s leadership prevented a large-scale tragedy,” he wrote.

Lewis was the daughter of Warren Harmon Lewis, a noted anatomist and editor of “Gray’s Anatomy,” and biologist Margaret Reed Lewis.

She received her A.B. degree in biochemistry from Baltimore’s Goucher College in 1938 and her medical degree from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1942. Lewis was the first woman fellow at Harvard’s Thorndike Memorial Laboratories at Boston City Hospital, where she did her hematology training from 1944 to 1946.

It was there that she met her future husband, Jack D. Myers. After their marriage in 1946, Lewis worked at Emory University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The couple moved here in 1955 when Myers was recruited to chair the Pitt medical school’s Department of Medicine. He died in 1998.

Lewis is survived by a son, John Lewis Myers of Freeport, Maine; daughters Jessica Reed Myers of Salisbury, Md. and Elizabeth Read Myers of Woodbridge, Conn.; nine grandchildren, and a sister, Margaret Nast Lewis of Cambridge, Mass.

Donations can be made to the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove, Maine 04672.

— Bruce Steele