Susan Blakely Shurin's Obituary
Dr. Susan B. Shurin, former director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and a prominent national researcher and clinician of pediatric blood diseases, died Aug. 31 in San Diego. She was 80.
Her death occurred suddenly at home while recovering from open heart surgery to repair a failing mitral valve.
Dr. Shurin joined NHLBI, one of the largest of the 27 components of the National Institutes of Health, as deputy director in 2006. She served the last three of her nine years at NHLBI as acting director, managing TV its $4.6 billion budget and many programs.
Among her many accomplishments, she led the trans-NIH development of policies for sharing genomic data obtained using taxpayer funds, and developed a global health program in non-communicable diseases, focusing on cardiovascular and pulmonary illnesses. She also led changes to NHLIB-supported sickle cell disease programs to enhance patient benefits from research.
After retiring from NHLBI in 2014, she became a senior advisor to the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Global Health, working to improve and coordinate internal biomedical research in low- and middle-income communities, focusing on cancer prevention and treatment affecting millions of people around the world.
Dr. Shurin’s specialty was studying and treating inherited diseases of blood cells. Her research focused on phagocyte function, the recognition and killing of pathogens in the blood, red cell destruction, and iron overload in blood. She led studies that resulted in an effective treatment for thalassemia (a reduction of red blood cells), dramatically improving treatment outcomes.
She was active in clinical research into many aspects of pediatric hematology-oncology (blood diseases and blood cancers), including multiple studies of sickle-cell disease and hemostasis (stopping blood loss after a vascular injury).
Dr. Shurin received her undergraduate degree at Harvard University and her medical training at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She came to the NIH from a long career at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, where she was director of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital. She was also an award-winning teacher of pediatrics and oncology at Case Western and director of pediatric oncology at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. She ended her career at Case as vice president and Secretary of the Corporation, dealing with the university board of trustees.
Dr. Shurin served on multiple NIH advisory panels and national professional organizations, including the American Society of Hematology (where she was treasurer), the American Board of Pediatrics, and the American Pediatric Society, among others. She founded and chaired the Children’s Cancer Group’s Bioethics Committee. In addition to publishing her own research, she was a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. She received numerous professional awards, including an endowed chair in her name at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer Center to support research into pediatric hematology-oncology.
Susan Shurin was born Nov. 16, 1944, the daughter of the late Robert and Eleanor White Blakely. She is survived by a son, Dr. Jonathan Shurin of San Diego, CA; a daughter-in-law, Dr. Catalina Reyes of San Diego; two brothers, Craig Blakely of St. Paul, MN, and Stephen Blakely, of East Sandwich, MA; two grandchildren, Olivia and Daniel Shurin of San Diego; two aunts, a niece and nephew; and several cousins. She also “adopted” two sisters: Marian Bennett, of Naples, FL (her Radcliffe College roommate), and Raye Farr, of Ft. Collins, CO (actually a step-sister); all three women shared a close and deep commitment to promoting civil rights.
Dr. Shurin’s youngest son, Daniel Robert Shurin, died in his sleep at age 15 in 1989. Her two marriages, to Dr. Paul Shurin of San Diego and David McCoy of Cleveland, ended in divorce.
Burial will be at the convenience of the family. Memorial contributions can be made to Feeding San Diego, World Central Kitchen, the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, or to the organization of your choice. Services provided by Clairemont Funeral Home, San Diego, CA.
Dr. Shurin was the last of a multi-generational family of notable doctors and role models.
Her greatest mentor was her maternal grandfather, Dr. Park White, a distinguished pediatrician in St. Louis, MO, and social activist and advocate for the interests and needs of children. He would bring all his grandchildren along on his house calls around St. Louis, hoping to instill them with his love of medicine and caring for others. With Susan, the infection took.
“He taught me the interpersonal skills necessary in retail medicine, like being a guest in our patients’ space,” she later recalled in a family history, “and the importance of touch in medicine.”
Her great-aunt, the late Dr. Katherine Bain, who practiced with Dr. White in St. Louis (where they ran one of the only integrated pediatric offices in a deeply segregated city), went on to join the Children’s Bureau in Washington in 1941, now the Office of Maternal and Child Health. In that position, Dr. Bain led many ground-breaking national pediatric health
initiatives, and would later travel the world helping to build global public health collaborations—a calling that Dr. Shurin would take up herself, decades later.
Her uncle, the late Dr. Laurens White, a prominent San Franciso oncologist who served as president of the California Medical Association, was also an important professional resource with experience in public health.
Other important influences in Dr. Shurin’s career included the late Dr. Alfred Gellhorn, director of the Center for Cancer Research at Columbia University and later dean of the School of Medicine, who let her work for two summers in his laboratory as a young intern; and Dr. David Nathan, then chief of hematology at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer Center (now Harvard professor of medicine), who directed her fellowship.
Having learned the importance of mentors in her career, Dr. Shurin returned the favor as often as possible to young students and doctors coming up in the medical profession.
One project she especially cherished was a program that brings a dozen or so undergraduate statistics students to Washington each year from Tougaloo College in Mississippi to work on the Jackson Heart Study, a long-term NHLBI investigation of heart disease risk factors in African Americans.
“One of my absolute favorite weeks at NIH was spending time with those students,” she recalled. “Most of them had never been on an airplane or out of Mississippi before.”
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