| Horton Johnson, a native of Wyoming, served for two and a half years
in the Navy (Pacific theater, 1944-1946), received his A.B. from Colorado
College, and his M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia
University in 1953. While in a surgical residency at the University of Michigan,
he developed his lifelong interest in pathology. After three years of pathology
training at Michigan and a year at the Massachusetts State Cancer Hospital
at Pondvill, he worked as a research fellow at the Brookhaven National Laboratory,
where he was the first to label a human carcinoma with the radioactive DNA
precursor, tritiated thymidine. In 1960 he was the first to measure the
S-phase fraction of a human breast carcinoma, showing that the mitotic cycles
of cancer cells are often much slower than those of their normal counterparts.
He became a tenured scientist at Brookhaven, where he worked in radiobiology,
biological applications of information theory, and the cellular and molecular
effects of thermal injury due to normal body temperature.
In 1970 he began his teaching career as Professor of Pathology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and later at Indiana University. For nine years he was Chairman of the Pathology Department at Tulane University. He received awards for almost every year of teaching, including the Lederle Medical Faculty Award and Tulane's Gloria Walsh Gold Medal for Teaching Excellence. At Tulane he served on the President's Advisory Council and in the University Senate, and was chosen by the medical students to be commencement speaker and class sponsor. A disciple of Alfred North Whitehead, he firmly believes that the student should spend less effort in accumulating information and more effort in learning how to use information intelligently. He likes to quote his one-time teacher, Andre Cournard, who said that the main goal of education is to teach the student how to solve problems that do not exist yet. IN 1984, he Professor of Pathology at Columbia and the Director of Pathology at St. Luke's - Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City. There he devoted himself almost entirely to the challenging practical problems of providing modern laboratory medicine in a hospital of 1100 beds. Since retiring to a part-time practice in 1991, Dr. Johnson has been able to spend more time in the fine arts. He played oboe for two seasons with the Doctors Symphony Orchestra of New York and has served as a volunteer tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Since 1993.
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