Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Pharmacology & Therapeutics 116 (2007) 527–528www.elsevier.com/locate/pharmthera

Obituary

In memoriamFriedrich Brunner (1952–2007)

NOTE TO READERS

Pharmacology and Therapeutics is sorry to inform itsreaders of the passing of Dr. Friedrich Brunner, who served asAssociate Editor from 2003 to 2007. Shown below is anobituary prepared by Dr. Bernd Mayer describing Dr. Brunner'scontributions to science.

Executive Editor-in-ChiefS. J. Enna, Ph.D.

Friedrich Brunner was born as the second of seven siblings onNovember 14, 1952 on a farm in the mountains of Styria(Austria). Friedrich studied Biology inGraz (Austria) from 1972–1975 then Botany at Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA)where he met his future wife, Christine, and graduated (M.Sc.) in1977. After his return to Graz he did his postgraduate studies on apharmacokinetic topic at Karl-Franzens University under thesupervision of Walter Kukovetz and received his Ph.D. in 1979.

doi:10.1016/j.pharmthera.2007.10.002

He continued his pharmacokinetic work as Assistant Professor atthe Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in Graz andlater as a postdoctoral student in the laboratory of Jean-PaulTillement at University of Paris XII in Créteil (France). Back toGraz in 1982 his interests moved from pharmacokinetics tocardiovascular pharmacology with focus on the characterizationof muscarinic receptor subtypes in blood vessels and cardiactissue. In the pre-cloning era of the early 1980s binding studieswith selective radioligands was the method of choice forassignment of defined biological effects of agonists to distinctreceptor subtypes. Friedrich became internationally recognizedfor his elaborate radioligand binding studies, part of which werecarried out in the course of research fellowships in the laboratoriesof Dieter Palm (1924–2005) in Frankfurt/Main (Germany) andJean Christophe in Brussels (Belgium). This work provided earlyevidence for heterogeneity of muscarinic receptors in mammalianhearts and for their expression on the plasma membrane ofvascular endothelial cells. The latter observation was of particularrelevance for the expanding field of endothelium-dependentrelaxation and the discovery of nitric oxide as a signaling mole-cule in the cardiovascular system. In 1989 Friedrich received hishabilitation for a thesis entitled “Muscarinic Receptor Subtypes”.

In 1990 Friedrich extended his expertise in cardiovascularpharmacology to studies with perfused isolated rat hearts withparticular focus on the role of endothelin and atrial natriureticpeptide (ANP) in myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury.Again, he sought an international collaboration to settle inthis new field of research and joined the Ischemic Heart DiseaseLaboratory directed by the renowned cardiologist Lionel Opieat the University of Cape Town (South Africa). During hisfellowship in the Opie laboratory from December 1990 untilMay 1992 he worked on the release of endothelins from isolatedperfused rat hearts subjected to ischemia/reperfusion and theirpotential role as mediators of reperfusion injury. Friedrichcontinued his fruitful collaboration with the Cape Town groupthroughout the 1990s. An important paper published in Circu-lation in 1998 showed that endothelin-1 impairs ventricular andcoronary function in ischemia/reperfusion via activation of ETAreceptors and Na+/H+ exchange.

528 Obituary

Friedrich was promoted to Associate Professor of Pharma-cology at Karl-Franzens University Graz in 1996. In addition tohis continuing work on the function of endothelins and otherpeptide hormones, including ANP and angiotensin-II in thecardiovascular system, he became increasingly interested in therole of nitric oxide signaling in cardiac ischemia/reperfusioninjury. In collaboration with my group and Rudolf Zechner atthe Department of Biochemistry he established transgenic micewith cardiomyocyte-specific overexpression of endothelialnitric oxide synthase (eNOS) as an animal model for cardiacnitric oxide overproduction and convincingly showed thateNOS-derived nitric oxide is protective against the loss ofcardiac contractility caused by ischemia/reperfusion. Friedrichpublished more than 80 papers in internationally recognizedjournals. He served as Associate Editor for Pharmacology andTherapeutics from 2003.

Friedrich was certainly a special character who questionedvirtually all aspects of research, teaching, and administration atour university. He did this in the course of sometimes emotionalbut always fact-based discussions with the clear goal ofobjective improvement and without getting tired of tilting atwindmills. He was an exceptionally scrupulous scientist whovehemently objected against even minute signs of looseness orsloppiness. I remember our endless discussions about thenumber of repetitions of a particular experiment required forpublication of a manuscript or presentation of the data at ascientific meeting. He has always insisted on extremely accurateand detailed descriptions of experimental conditions, extensivediscussion of all potential pitfalls one could think of and carefulselection of relevant references. Once I joked with him that hewould reject his own papers if he could. Making such highdemands on himself he was similarly demanding on coworkers,students and even his family. As a strictly conservative

proponent of proper linguistic usage and a virtually accent-less speaker of English and French, Friedrich not only criticizedbad language in manuscripts written by natives of the UK orUSA but did not hesitate to correct the spoken French of hiswife, Christine, who was born and raised in France. With hishumanistic education in Latin and classical Greek, he lovedexplaining to us the etymology of every single foreign word weused in our scientific or private life. Overall, I may have left theimpression of Friedrich being a boring fuddy-duddy oddball.However, this interpretation would be totally inappropriate. Infact, he was a very cheerful person and raised these issues with ayouthful sense of humor and self-irony, often while having abeer or two in a nearby bar or during one of our departmentoutings in a countryside vineyard, which he organized withpleasure. Last but not least, he was a loving husband andaffectionate father.

Having been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis(ALS) in October 2005, Friedrich has battled against thisterrible disease leading to successive loss of muscle function forthe last two years. He continued his scientific work as far aspossible but eventually lost his faculty of speech. Consideringhis great pleasure in intensive communication with his family,friends, and colleagues as well as his lifelong passion forlinguistic usage, this was certainly the most tragic aspect of hisdisease. Friedrich Brunner died at home on October 3, 2007. Heis survived by his wife and two children, Flavia (born 1991) andAdrian (born 1993).

Bernd MayerDepartment of Pharmacology and Toxicology,Karl-Franzens University Graz, Univ.-Platz 2,

A-8010 Graz, AustriaE-mail address: mayer@uni-graz.at.