Clinical Chemistry 61:4
573–576 (2015)
Inspiring Minds
Prepared by Misia Landau
David Bruns
David Bruns loves to tell stories and he tells them
enchantingly well. Once he casts off—and listening to
his fluid folksy voice feels a bit like sailing—it’s hard
not to be transported. Part of it is that silken voice
which, especially when recounting a joke or one of
the pranks he loves to play, seems to coast on the
verge of a chuckle. Part of it is the way he plunges in,
attending to details, fleshing out people and places,
taking his sweet time but always managing to give his
stories some semblance of a beginning, middle, and
ending.
“You know if you’re going to talk to Dave, it’s
going to be a while. But you’re not going to mind a
bit,” said Jack Ladenson, the Oree M. Carroll and
Lillian B. Ladenson professor of clinical chemistry at
Washington University School of Medicine.
“He has some jokes that he tells over and over again.
I don’t mind listening to them because they’re so good
and he tells them so well,” said Carl Burtis, retired staff
member in the Health Services Division of the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory. “He’d be good around the
campfire.”
During a recent conversation, Bruns, who is professor of pathology at the University of Virginia, told a tale
drawn from an early chapter of his life. Born in St. Louis
on December 12 1941, just five days after the invasion of
Pearl Harbor, America was on the brink of war. Yet for
years it had been fighting a less visible foe. Polio had
crippled a whole generation of men and women. Bruns’s
father, a tennis player and swimmer, contracted the virus
when he was in high school. Still, he managed to attend
law school, even in winter, despite the braces and
crutches.
“If there was ice on the stairs, and there were many
stairs leading up to the law school building, he’d go in
through the coal chute,” Bruns said.
It’s just a vignette, a snippet of a tale, but told in
Bruns’s laid-back yet laconic way it seems particularly
revealing. Bruns, who is regarded as one of the most
innovative and visionary clinical chemists of his day, has
a habit of solving problems by taking a less travelled
route. “David is a unique individual in that he digs very
deeply into any topic that he tackles, much more so than
the average person,” said Jim Boyd, associate professor of
pathology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. “He always uncovers stuff that is not immediately
apparent.”
As a first year resident in the then-nascent clinical
chemistry program at Washington University, he showed
that calcium has a profound effect on platelets—it stimulates them to do just about everything platelets do. For
weeks, his collaborator, a platelet
expert, refused to
believe the seemingly outlandish
findings. Finally,
he came around,
but by then it was
too late. “We got
scooped,” Bruns
said.
Over the following years, first
at
Washington
University and later at the University of Virginia, he
tackled a wide array of problems. “I get excited about
all kinds of things,” he said. Working with his wife
Elizabeth Bruns—they ran a lab together at the University of Virginia for 20 years— he explored the role
that calcium-regulating hormones play during pregnancy, shedding light on the question of how calcium
gets from mother to fetus, an area that few had previously investigated.
In 1984, working with his then-postdoc, Jack Zakowski, he set out to purify an amylase from ovarian
tumors that eventually became the basis for one of the
first monoclonal assays in clinical chemistry. Perhaps
the most dramatic story of Bruns’s career occurred a
few years earlier when he heard about 14 patients in
the University hospital burn unit who mysteriously
died. Working with colleagues, he helped to show,
through painstaking analysis, that the culprit was the
burn cream and specifically its polyethylene glycol
base. “It was being used by the pound in these patients,” he said. The FDA sent out a “Dear Doctor”
letter, which still hangs in Bruns’s office, outlining the
cream’s proper use.
Bruns’s intense curiosity and easily excited intellect—
he was among the first to embrace the emerging field of
molecular diagnostics—found a natural roost on January
1, 1990, when he became editor of this journal, Clinical Chemistry. Not that the landing was entirely
smooth. Bruns wanted to transform and expand the
journal’s reach, cutting across and uniting disciplines,
much as he had done in his own career and, in the
process, to redefine the field of chemistry. But he was
confronted with, among other things, an antiquated
computer system and a lack of staff. “I would come
into his small office in the Towers building and he had
mountains of folders filled with manuscripts piled up
on his desk. He was trying to deal with all this stuff,”
said Boyd.
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Inspiring Minds
With the help of Boyd and also colleagues like Ladenson, Burtis, and many others, he would turn Clinical
Chemistry from a small societal journal into a cutting
edge international publication—among the first to use
electronic publication and tracking. “That gave Clinical Chemistry an edge up in terms of other journals in
the field,” said Boyd. Over the 17 years that he was at
the helm, the journal’s impact factor more than quadrupled. He also transformed colleagues into friends,
turning the journal into a kind of scientific campfire.
“We were fortunate to be drawn together with the
journal being the focus for a lot of it. Going through
tremendous changes and differences of opinion—
there’s a certain bonding that goes on because of that,”
said Burtis.
Then there are the pranks. Tall, long-legged, and
lanky with a wave of brown hair that’s only recently
started to go gray, Bruns exudes a wholesome charm. Yet,
he is also a dyed-in-the-wool practical joker. “He’s just
got that little devilish trait in him, I guess. We always
have a lot of fun with it—it gets a great laugh. It’s endearing. It’s just part of his uniqueness,” said Boyd. Bruns’s
pranks and other exploits are the stuff of legend. “Did
you hear the one about . . . ?” is a common refrain among
colleagues and friends. Rumors have swirled that, during
medical school, he played bass in a band called “Orifice
and the Sphincters.” Also that, during his college days, he
had fallen in with a mythical character named Sweeney
who spouted aphorisms that Bruns would repeat years
later.
“I think there’s a real Sweeney and that he—
Dave—is not Sweeney,” said Burtis. Ladenson concurs.
“I was walking across the main campus with Dave and he
pointed and said, ‘That’s where Sweeney lived.’ It was a
window with a fire escape,’” said Ladenson. There is
something fitting about this image. Choosing a friend
who may have climbed into his room up a fire escape
seems just about right for a man whose father took the
coal chute.
As it turns out, Bruns’s dad, Eugene, graduated law
school at the top of his class and was offered a job with the
IRS. He met and married Ellen Elizabeth, a young
woman with an artistic spirit. When Bruns was born, 13
days before Christmas, she sent out a homemade card
with a linoleum block print of a stork carrying an infant
and a poem:
Santa Claus can’t keep up
No matter how he runs
For the stork arrived on December 12th
With David Eugene Bruns.
Two years later, while attempting to give birth to her
second child, she was given some gas. “It was the early
days of anesthesia,” Bruns said. She aspirated and died.
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Only 2 years old, Bruns was left with no memories
of his mother. “I have a photograph of her which is sort
of my image of what she looked like,” he said. Four
years later, at a party, Eugene met a young schoolteacher named Helen. They married and moved to the
west side of St. Louis, near the old World’s Fair
grounds. They eventually had three daughters. “It was
a tight knit family,” said Bruns. Eugene, who came
from German stock, could be strict. His English was
impeccable and he expected mine to be too,” said
Bruns. Apparently, he expected the same even of his
daughters’ suitors. Family legend has it that, after dinner one evening, one such suitor made a comment that
had Eugene calling for the dictionary.
On the face of it, they were an observant family—
they went to church every Sunday. “My father mostly
looked bored,” Bruns said. “I had a lot of doubts about
the whole deal.” Still, he would attend Catholic
schools all the way through high school. “I liked kindergarten. I had a blonde teacher who I apparently
really liked. But then we came back to first grade and
we had a nun all dressed in black. I didn’t care for
that,” he said. On the third or fourth day, while
marching from church to his classroom, he slipped
away. “I had enough. It was a pretty long way home.
Nobody knows how I found my way but I did,” Bruns
said.
Bruns frequently used his wits. Shy and reserved,
and not terribly athletic, he lived in a neighborhood
filled with kids playing baseball, football, and basketball. “I made up games that I had a little better chance
of surviving at—a kids’ version of golf,” he said.
Though he excelled at his studies, and he would get
into an extremely competitive Jesuit high school on
scholarship, he had some difficulty navigating the social landscape. “I was not the popular kind of character. I wouldn’t have characterized myself as being particularly happy in high school,” he said.
One day, at a family gathering, he overheard two of
his very pretty, very popular female cousins talking.
“They were in the bathroom and they said they’d heard,
‘David has an inferiority complex.’ Well, maybe I did.
Maybe that’s true,” said Bruns. “It could be that it took
me a while to get over what happens to kids when their
mothers die. Because depression is very common in that
population.”
Bruns’s world opened up when he went to college.
He applied to the chemical engineering department at
Washington University and was accepted with an extremely handsome scholarship. No longer confined by
the strictures of his Jesuit high school, he began to
spread his wings socially. He would spend hours sitting in coffee shops talking about philosophy and religion. “We all thought we were thinking really deep
thoughts,” he said. That was especially true of his
Inspiring Minds
friend Ray Svonavec, otherwise known as “Sweeney.”
“He had an opinion on everything and usually could
summarize it in a sentence. Years later, I was still quoting things he used to say,” Bruns said.
Bruns alternated between living at home and in a
fraternity. One of his frat mates played guitar and wanted
to form a band with his girlfriend but they needed another member. Bruns got roped in. “I didn’t know
anything about music,” he said. He learned guitar.
The trio played folk music in the style of Pete Seeger
and the Kingston Trio, and later Peter, Paul and Mary,
and got gigs performing at Gaslight Square, which
was, at the time, St. Louis’s hottest entertainment district. At some point, another local group, better than
theirs, lost one of its members and asked Bruns to take
his place. “They were under contract with a talent
company in New York and had gigs lined up all over
the country—New York, Las Vegas,” said Bruns. “I
said, ‘Okay.’ So I was learning all their routines and
pretty well had them down, when another chemical
engineer’s father got hold of me and gave me a Dutch
uncle lecture. ‘Are you crazy? You’re going to give up a
scholarship?’”
He stayed and graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in 1963. During his college years, he
had worked in a summer camp for underprivileged
kids—some lived in orphanages, many came from broken homes and had police records—and had become
fascinated by their plight. “I was trying to understand
what was going on in their minds,” he said. Inspired by
this work, Bruns decided to go to medical school but
he had never studied biology. A dean convinced him it
wouldn’t take much to go for another degree, this one
in liberal arts. He graduated in 1965 and went to St.
Louis University School of Medicine.
One day in the library he saw a pretty girl. “I had
noticed her before. We chatted so I asked her, ‘Would
you like to go out for a beer?’ She said, ‘No,’” Bruns said.
It turns out Liz, who was doing her PhD in biochemistry,
had a test the next day. “She swears she knew that I
would come back,” said Bruns. “She saw a twinkle in
my eye.” They turned out to be a match not just romantically (they married) but professionally (they
would run a lab together.) Like many well-matched
couples, they seem to balance each other. “At home,
she’s loving and supportive with the kids and me. I’m
a bit more like my dad— better get it right,” Bruns
said. As for work, “she gets good ideas that are very,
very different from the ideas I get. I’m thinking in the
abstract about mechanisms and stuff. She’s just thinking at a more practical level.”
They had their first child, David, in 1969 and
Beth in 1972. Over the years, to make ends meet,
Bruns would alternately work as a research chemist at
Sigma Chemical Company where he was involved in
developing hospital assays. He graduated in 1973, and
was being courted by the chairs of internal medicine
and the psychiatry departments. Meanwhile, he heard
that Leonard Jarrett over at Washington University
had started a residency program in laboratory medicine. Jarrett told him that after some basic training in
lab medicine he could work in any lab he liked. “I
thought, ‘Wow, how can I beat that?’” Bruns said. One
day, they met in Jarrett’s office. Bruns mentioned that
he was thinking of working in a psychiatry lab, one
with a biochemical approach. “My god, Bruns—you
can do research anywhere you want but not in psychiatry!’ That was the end of working in psychiatry. Of
course what I wound up doing is working in Leonard’s
lab,” he said.
It was there that he met Ladenson and also Jay
McDonald, who, among other things, would initiate
him into the fine art of practical joking. “Jay and Jack
were the past masters. I was a junior member of the
team. When I got to the University of Virginia, I
found out that most places don’t behave that way,” he
said. That would change. Bruns arrived at the University of Virginia in 1977 and was soon joined by John
Savory. He was helping Savory move into his apartment when he noticed some letterhead from the American Board of Clinical Chemistry, where Savory was
secretary. “I thought, ‘Well, I’d better pinch some of
that,’” Bruns said. He composed a letter to the department chair stating that Dr. Savory had his license revoked because he had no college education. He signed
it with the name of the clerk at the Board. The chair
read it and immediately put it in Savory’s mailbox with
a note that said ‘Let’s talk about this.’ That night
Savory went to the chair’s house for dinner. Savory
confessed that he had no idea who could’ve written the
letter. “He said, ‘All I can think is, I once had a graduate student who’s in a mental hospital—it must’ve
been her.’ The chairman, who was from Wash. U. said,
‘Oh, John! Don’t you know who did this? It’s Bruns.
Wash U. people—they’re all this way.’ So John said,
‘What shall we do about this?’ The chair said, ‘Just
don’t say a thing,’” Bruns said. “I couldn’t get a rise
out of either one of them.”
Bruns lives in a gorgeous wood and glass house at
the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He and Liz once
had cows on their five acres but now spend their time
tending the beautiful gardens. Bruns rises at 5:30 AM
and may go for a run before sitting down to his breakfast of Cheerios, fruit, and coffee. He gets to his office,
which is located in the old medical school building,
between 8:30 and 9. On his walls lie the framed FDA
letter along with a pen and ink drawing of the building
in Winston-Salem, North Carolina where the Clinical
Chemistry executive committee used to meet, and
many plaques. “My next challenge is deciding what to
Clinical Chemistry 61:4 (2015) 575
Inspiring Minds
do with all these plaques,” he said. He plans to retire in
a year and a half, at least officially, but remains completely active, spending much of his time teaching fellows and residents.
He leaves the office sometime around 6 PM—a far
cry from the late nights he put in when he was editor of
the journal—and comes home to dinner made by Liz.
During the holidays, the house is overrun with their five
grandchildren. It’s possible that Bruns will enchant them
with a yarn or two. Years ago, he and Ladenson would
take their families to an old camp ground, called Clopton
Farm, for 50 cents a night per person. They slept in old
slave cabins, did their own cooking, and generally had
a grand old time.
“One day, we said, ‘Dave, why don’t you feed the
kids?’ So he’s out there with peanut butter, maybe some
jelly, and bread. He’s sitting under a tree, kids all around.
And he is buttering that peanut butter as slow as I think
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Clinical Chemistry 61:4 (2015)
it’s possible. And he’s telling them stories. It might’ve
taken five minutes per piece of bread. And all I can think
is, ‘My god, it’s Uncle Remus’—you know, the black
character who used to tell stories to children in Disney
movies. They were fascinated,” said Ladenson. “Starving
or not, they did not push him.”
Sponsored by the
Department of Laboratory Medicine
Boston Children’s Hospital
Misia Landau
e-mail [email protected]
DOI: 10.1373/clinchem.2014.233536