Richard Lambert Masland, MD (1910–2003)

Dr. Richard Lambert Masland, a former chairman of neurology at Columbia University who led a landmark study of the causes of birth defects that became a template for US-funded biomedical research, died December 19, 2003 of pneumonia at his home in Englewood, New Jersey. He was 93. ⇓

Inspired as a boy to become a physician by the accounts of medical missionaries, Masland gravitated to brain science. He was especially interested in finding the causes of mental retardation, hoping to find measures that could lower the number of affected persons. He also promoted efforts to find effective therapies for epilepsy and dyslexia.

From 1959 to 1968, Dr. Masland served as the director of the National Institute of Neurologic Diseases and Blindness of the NIH. In that position, he was part of a team that crafted the merit-based peer-review system that has been the foundation of medical research in the United States. He was unusually willing to join forces with laymen to sponsor research, campaign for laws to protect the rights of the handicapped, and to develop policies that might prevent brain injury.

Masland developed a program of “paired research grants” to neuroscientists in Poland and Yugoslavia. Each investigator from those countries was matched with a scientist in the United States who would visit the European center at least once a year. Originally, these impoverished countries could not pay for food they imported from the United States during and after World War II. Masland credited US Congress Representative John Fogarty (from Rhode Island) with the idea of using credits from those debts to support medical research. Masland was …