It turns out that in the 1960s and 1970s, Kilmer S. McCurry, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School, had expelled him into the basement and claimed that the amino acid homocysteine ​​had been overlooked as a potential risk factor for heart disease.
His daughter, Martha McCurry, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. His death was not widely reported at the time.
The idea that remains debated today, Dr. McCurry's theory – the inadequate intake of certain vitamins, causes high levels of homocysteine ​​in the blood and strengthens arteries with plaque – challenges the cholesterol-centric paradigm supported by the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. McCurry didn't think cholesterol should be ignored, but he thought it was cheating to ignore the importance of homocysteine. His boss at Harvard University disagreed. First, they moved his lab under the ground. They then told him to leave. He had a hard time finding a job for years.
“It was very traumatic,” he told New York Times medical reporter Gina Korata in 1995. “People don't believe you. They think you're crazy.”
Dr. McCurry subtly hunted himself as a Louis Pasteur-like microbial hunt at a medical conference in Boston in the late 1960s. There he learned about homocystinuria. This is a genetic disorder in which large amounts of homocysteine ​​are found in the urine of children with developmental disorders.
Presenting a 9-year-old girl with a case of homocystinuria, doctors said that her uncle died of a stroke in the 1930s when she was 8 years old and suffered from the same illness. “How did an 8-year-old die in the way an elderly man?” Dr. McCurry wrote in “The Heart Revolution” (1999) with his daughter.
He was surprised when Dr. McCurry followed the autopsy report and tissue samples: the boy stiffened his arteries, but there was no cholesterol or fat in the plaque accumulation. A few months later he learned about a boy with homocystinuria who had recently passed away. He was also stiffening his arteries.
“I barely slept for two weeks,” he wrote.
In 1969, Dr. McCurry published a paper on the case studies in the American Journal of Pathology. The following year, in the same journal, he explained what happened after injecting a high dose of homocysteine. “The aorta of all 13 animals injected with homocysteine ​​were moderately thick,” he wrote, “compared to controls.”
Dr. McCulley followed up on other studies. He suggested that people with low intake of folic acid and vitamins B6 and B12 should consume five fruits and vegetables a day. He also recommended the development of a blood test for homocysteine.
Medical experts responded with “Stony's Silence,” Dr. McCurry told The Times. In 1979 he said the chairman of Harvard's department told him, “You feel you haven't proved your theory.” He decided to leave and he was unemployed until 1981. In 1981, Veterans Hospital in Providence, Rhodeley hired him as a pathologist.
“I felt him and admired him,” J. David Spence, professor emeritus at the University of West Ontario who studies homocysteine, said in an interview. “He was ignored more than he should have been. That was sad.”
It began to change in the early 1990s. A large, longitudinal study of the risk of heart disease revealed that Dr. McCulley was actually on the right path when Harvard forced him into the basement.
Data from the Framingham Heart study, which began in 1948 and is still being conducted, showed a higher proportion of brain-associated sclerotic arteries among participants with elevated homocysteine ​​levels. A study by the Harvard University School of Public Health in Boston and the Hospital of Brigham and Women found that men with high homocysteine ​​were three times more likely to suffer a heart attack than men with low levels.
“At the end of the day, he was right in the sense that homocysteine ​​is a marker for a higher risk of cardiovascular disease,” said Mare Stampfer, an epidemiologist at Harvard University who led the study, in an interview. “He has gained credibility that it helps to develop this theory and provide evidence for it.”
Kilmer Serjus McCully was born on December 23, 1933 in Dakin, Nevada, and grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington. His father, Harold McCurry, was a psychology counseling expert at the U.S. Department of Education. His mother, Lulu (Litwinenko) McCurry, was an artist and piano teacher.
As a teenager, Kilmer was fascinated by other books investigating the disease, including “The Microbial Hunter,” Paul de Kruyf's 1926 Pasteur, Walter Reid and Robert Koch. He knew almost immediately that he wanted to be a scientist.
He studied biochemistry, psychology and chemistry at Harvard University, where he took classes with BF Skinner and graduated in 1955. He was known as Kim in 1959.
Following an internship and postdoc fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. McCurry joined Harvard Medical School's Faculty of Pathology in 1965.
He married Anina Jacobs in 1955. She passed away in 2023.
In addition to his daughter Martha, he was survived by his son Michael. Two grandchildren. Two great grandchildren. sister Marilyn Lebern.
After research in the 1990s supported his theory, Dr. McCurry became something of a media star.
The New York Times magazine featured him in a 1997 article, “The Fall and Rise of Kilmer McCully.” On the 1999 NPR program “Fresh Air,” he told host Terry Gross: “Because when I was younger, this is what I want to do in my life.”
However, homocysteine ​​remains a controversial subject of medicine.
Major healthcare providers do not recommend testing it, citing mixed results from studies that examined whether a decrease in homocysteine ​​leads to a decrease in cardiovascular events. (There is strong evidence that it helps prevent strokes.)
“It's a strange business to me that people aren't paying enough attention to this yet,” Dr. Spence said. “Maybe doctors didn't like the lessons of biochemistry.”
As for Harvard University, Dr. McCurry's family said he never had anything bitter about his treatment. At a medical school reunion in 1999, his classmates presented him with a silver platter.
It was engraved with “Kim McCully, who actually saw the truth before the rest of us, before the rest of us, and would not be pushed aside.”
