Wallace H. Coulter Award Presented to Ernest Beutler, MD

At the 2007 ASH Annual Meeting, Ernest Beutler, MD, was awarded the inaugural Wallace H. Coulter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Hematology, which honors his lifelong work furthering the understanding of hematology.

The award is named for Wallace Henry Coulter, a prolific inventor who made important contributions to hematology and was a strong supporter of ASH. To date, he is the only person to receive the American Society of Hematology Distinguished Service Award for his enormous contribution to the field of hematology. The Wallace H. Coulter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Hematology is bestowed on an individual who has demonstrated a lifetime commitment and outstanding contribution to hematology, and who has made a significant impact on education, research, and/or practice. Dr. Beutler will be the award's first recipient, the latest of many "firsts" that have highlighted his distinguished career.

Dr. Beutler has spent much of his career at the forefront of hematologic discovery. He was the first to demonstrate the functional importance of X chromosome inactivation in the human female. He investigated the pattern of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase activity in the red cells of a woman heterozygous for the enzyme deficiency, leading to a technique to determine the clonal origin of tumors and to distinguish neoplastic from non-neoplastic tissue changes. He cloned the gene for Gaucher disease and developed replacement treatment for it. He started a marrow transplantation program at City of Hope and, with Karl Blume, MD, published the first paper supporting the use of allogeneic marrow transplantation as a primary treatment of acute leukemia in first remission.

"He is not constrained by conventional thinking and he has had the satisfaction of seeing that his approach and his thinking have been confirmed time and time again," writes Wendell F. Rosse, MD.

Like Mr. Coulter, Dr. Beutler is also an inventor, and one of his other significant "firsts" was the development of one of the first computer programs for cataloging citations. After using a manual card-sorting device to store the vast number of citations in his papers and books, he decided to digitize the process. He learned how to program from his son Earl, and soon tapped out the code that would become Citation Manager, a forerunner of systems like PubMed or ASH's own Hematology Library.

Indeed, typing Dr. Beutler's name into the search box at www.hematologylibrary.org calls up more than 12,000 results. His extensive research experience has been documented in his 800 publications, 19 books, and more than 300 book chapters.

Marshall A. Lichtman, MD, has noted that, "Ernie is among a very small number of physician-scientists who over five decades during the 20th century has made notable contributions to the understanding of a remarkable range of human diseases."

His contributions have been recognized with several honors in addition to the Wallace H. Coulter Award. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975), National Academy of Sciences (1976), and the presidency of the Western Association of Physicians (1990) and the Institute of Medicine (2004). He has received numerous awards including the Gairdner award (1975), the James Blundell Prize of the British Blood Transfusion Society (1985), the Spinoza Chair of the University of Amsterdam (1991), and the Mayo Soley Award of the Western Society for Clinical Investigation (1992), to name a few. The American Society of Hematology has previously awarded him the E. Donnall Thomas Lecture and Prize (2003) and elected him President (1979).

This article originally ran in the December 9, 2007, issue of ASH News Daily.