Elkind, Mortimer M.

AN AMERICAN BIOPHYSICIST and radiobiologist, Elkind M. Mortimer (1922–2000) was the winner of the Charles F. Kettering Prize of the General Motors Cancer Foundation in 1989 for “describing the repair of sublethal injury in irradiated mammalian cells and for defining the implications of the reparative process.”

Mortimer Murray Elkind was born on October 25, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Samuel W. Elkind and Yetta (née Lubarsky). His father, a musician, was born in Russia, and his mother was born in England of Russian parents. Elkind gained his B.M.E. from Cooper Union in 1943 and then went to the Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn (M.M.E., 1949), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing a Masters of Science in electrical engineering in 1951, and then a Doctorate in Physics in 1953.

During World War II, Elkind was an assistant project engineer of Wyssmont Company, New York City, and was the project engineer with Safe Flight Instrument Corporation from 1946 until 1949. He then became head of the instrumentation section of Sloan Kettering Institute of Technology from 1949 to 1953; and a physicist at the National Cancer Institute on assignment to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1949 to 1953; and on assignment to Donner Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley from 1953–54.

Dr. Elkind then became a physicist at the Laboratory of Physiology of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, from 1954 until 1967, then was senior research physicist at the National Cancer Institute until 1968. He was also, concurrently, a member of the radiation study section of the National Institute of Health (N.I.H.) from 1962 until 1966. He then was appointed senior biophysicist at the biology department at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, Long Island, New York, from 1969 until 1973.

At the same time, Dr. Elkind was a member of the molecular biology study section of the N.I.H. from 1970–71. He also spent two years in England as guest scientist at the M.R.C. in the experimental radiopathology unit, Hammersmith, London from 1971 until 1973, and from 1973 was senior biophysicist at the division of biology and medical research, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, from 1973. From 1972 until 1974 he was a special fellow at the National Cancer Institute; and from 1975 until 1977 he was a member of the developmental therapeutics committee of the National Cancer Institute.

A member of the faculty of the University of Chicago, he was professor of radiology there from 1973 until 1981. He was also assistant director from 1976 until 1978, and the head of the mammalian cell biology group at the university from 1978 until 1981. Dr. Elkind then moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, and became professor and chair of the department of radiology and radiation biology at Colorado State University from 1981 until 1989. He was also the university's distinguished professor at the department of radiological health science from 1986.

A keen educator, Dr. Elkind wrote extensively. His first book, Served with the U.S.N.R. (1944–46), was about his service in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II. He was the coauthor of The Radiobiology of Cultured Mammalian Cells, as well as “Low-Dose-Rate Dependence of the Phenotypic and Genotypic Expressions of Mutagenesis by 131Cs Gamma [Page 314]Rays,” Radiation Oncology Investigations (1995) and “Cell-to-Cell Communication and the Sensitive Window for Neoplastic Transformation of C3H Mouse Embryo 1OT1/2 cells,” International Journal of Radiation Biology (1995).

...