The Most Influential Scientist in the Development of Medical informatics (10): Marsden S. Blois

REVIEW / ACTA INFORM MED. 2016 FEB; 24(1): 78-79 MARSDEN S. BLOIS (1919–1988) Marsden Scott Blois Jr., was an internationally recognized physician and scientist – professor of Dermatology and professor of Medical information science, visionary in Health Informatics. Scott Blois was Professor and Chairman of the Section on Medical Information Science at the University of California in San Francisco (1-4). Also, he was Professor of Dermatology and founder and Director of the Melanoma Clinic in San Francisco. Scott was born in San Antonio, Texas, January 5, 1919. He lived in various areas of California during his early schooling, including the Central Valley and San Francisco. He enrolled in the United States Naval Academy in 1938 and because of World War II he graduated a year early in 1941 and immediately assigned as a line officer on a destroyer escort in the South Pacific. Scott spent the remaining years of the war conducting classified work for what was to become the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Washington, D.C. where he continued to carry out research in the Navy as Director of Research at the naval facilities in Corona, California. When he resigned from the Navy he studied physics at Stanford University where he worked under Professor Paul Kirkpatrick on the physical and magnetic properties of deposited metallic thin films. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford in 1952. After receiving his degree in physics, Scott joined with some other physics graduates interested in physical approaches to biology, to help found the Biophysics Laboratory on the Stanford campus as part of the Hansen Laboratories of Applied Physics. Scott later served as Director of the Biophysics Graduate Program, while developing his research on the electron spin resonance of biopolymers, including melanins. He observed the presence of free radicals trapped in melanin, and was one of the first investigators to suggest that free radicals were an integral part of biological systems. Scott began his medical studies at Stanford Medical School while he was Director of the Biophysics Laboratory, a position he left to begin a dermatology residency at Department of Dermatology at Stanford, chaired. by Dr. Eugene Farber, sometimes worked very hardly and more than 10-15 hours daily on his research and as physician with patients. The Melanoma Clinic at UCSF began because of Scott's recognition of the fragmentation of care for melanoma patients. In 1971 dermatologists and family physicians were seeing the initial lesions, and surgeons were rather radically performing “definitive therapy.”(4). At that point many patients were left on their own without any coherent or recognizable followup. The Most Influential Scientist in the Development of Medical informatics (10): Marsden S. Blois