Jacob Robbins, 85, Thyroid Researcher, Is Dead
Published: June 2, 2008
Dr. Jacob Robbins, whose studies of the thyroid gland at the National Institutes of Health helped explain how it helps govern metabolism and how thyroid cancers caused by radiation may be treated or possibly prevented, died on May 12 in Bethesda, Md. He was 85.
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National Institutes of Health
Dr. Jacob Robbins studied thyroid cancer and the thyroid’s role in metabolism.
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The cause was heart failure, his family said.
With another endocrinologist at the health institutes, Joseph E. Rall, Dr. Robbins embarked on a study of thyroxine, an important hormone produced by the thyroid that helps regulate metabolism. In the 1950s, the two researchers theorized that levels of thyroxine might vary in the bloodstream, but that the level of thyroxine actually in use would often be markedly lower. They found that thyroxine had to be “free,” or not bound to globulin and other plasma proteins, to be effective, whatever the overall thyroxine level in the bloodstream.
The findings of Dr. Robbins and Dr. Rall yielded insights about what are “normal and pathologic states in the thyroid, and how to distinguish between them,” said Dr. Phillip Gorden, an endocrinologist who directed the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the N.I.H. from 1986 to 1999. The observations have also aided physicians and pharmaceutical companies in developing targeted dosages of thyroxine, which in some pregnant women helps prevent or treat hypothyroidism, a hormone deficiency that can cause lasting developmental problems in infants.
In further fruitful collaborations with Dr. Rall and others, Dr. Robbins studied incidences of thyroid cancer in patients exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear testing. Earlier, in the 1950s, he had examined the therapeutic properties of radioactive iodine when used to pinpoint and treat cancer in the thyroid. In the decades that followed, Dr. Robbins became an authority on the harmful effects of radioactive iodine released spontaneously into the atmosphere.
At the health institutes, Dr. Robbins helped direct long-term studies of the survivors of nuclear tests and accidents, and he followed the health effects of iodine fallout after the Chernobyl reactor meltdown in Ukraine in 1986 and after American weapons testing in the Marshall Islands from the 1940s to the 1980s. He joined a vocal group of scientists who called for wider availability of a drug that can help prevent thyroid cancers from showing up after intense exposures to radiation. That drug, potassium iodide, is taken orally and floods the thyroid with iodine to block the absorption of radioactive iodine.
Dr. Robbins argued that people living near commercial nuclear reactors, particularly children, should have immediate access to potassium iodide. He urged the federal government to stockpile the drug and widen its potential distribution.
In 2001, he told The New York Times, “To me, the smart thing to do would be to have it in homes, in blister packs with adhesive backs.”
Jacob Robbins was born in Yonkers. He studied chemistry at Cornell before earning a medical degree there in 1947.
Dr. Robbins joined the health institutes as an investigator in 1954. He was chief of the clinical endocrinology branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases from 1963 to 1991. The health institutes named him a scientist emeritus in 1995.
Dr. Robbins was a president of the American Thyroid Association. From 1968 to 1972, he was editor in chief of the journal Endocrinology.
Dr. Robbins is survived by his wife, the former Jean Adams. The couple lived in Bethesda. He is also survived by a son, Mark, of Seattle; two daughters, Alice of Amherst, Mass., and Susan of Shelburne Falls, Mass.; a brother, Lionel, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; a sister, Evelyn Savitzky of Pittsboro, N.C.; and four grandchildren.
