November 3, 1996
Philip J. Fialkow, M.D. and Helen Fialkow found dead in Nepal on Nov. 3, 1996
Philip J. Fialkow was born in New York City Aug. 20, 1934. He married Helen Dimitrakis in June 1960. She was born on Jan. 30, 1934 in Boston and earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. The couple met at Tufts University’s Cancer Research Laboratory while Fialkow was a medical student.
During their 36 years of marriage, the Fialkows traveled extensively and shared a passion for hiking and exploration that they imparted to their two children, as well. They were strong supporters of the Audubon Society, The Nature Conservatory and the Friends of the Lake District. Hiking up 17,500-foot Se La, the last mountain the couple gained before perishing in Nepal last week, was one of their greatest accomplishments, family members said. They had an enormous respect for and interest in other cultures and were always looking to learn more about other people and other places.
Fialkow graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1952 and from the University of Pennsylvania in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.
He graduated cum laude from Tufts University’s medical school in 1960 and then moved to San Francisco for an internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He came to the UW in 1962 to complete his residency and then became a fellow in the division of medical genetics.
He served in several faculty and administrative positions after joining the School of Medicine faculty in 1965. From 1974 to 1980, he was vice chair of the Department of Medicine and chief of medicine at the Seattle Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He went on to become the chair of the school’s Department of Medicine and physician in chief of the UW Medical Center, positions he held for a decade before he was named dean of the School of Medicine in 1990. He was appointed vice president for medical affairs in 1992, extending his responsibility to administration of UW Medical Center and Harborview Medical Center.
Fialkow was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. He served as a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Affairs Department and other national organizations, and on the editorial boards of the medical journals Medicine and Leukemia.
He held a National Institutes of Health MERIT Award to support his research on the origins of human tumors, work he carried on in addition to his administrative posts. In 1995 he received the Mayo Soley Award from the Western Society for Clinical Investigation for his original and important contributions in research.
In 1967 he published a seminal paper, “Clonal Origin of Chronic Myelocytic Leukemia in Man,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In this paper, he provided the first evidence that a leukemic process was clonal and involved a stem cell, and demonstrated how the technique of X-linked cellular mosaicism could be used to analyze the origins of cancer. In the 1970s, Fialkow’s research group provided the first rigorous proof that a common lympho-hematopoietic stem cell exists in humans, and the first evidence for the multistep pathogenesis of chronic myelogenous leukemia.
In another series of studies on acute myeloid leukemia, Fialkow and colleagues demonstrated that the disorder is clonal and heterogeneous with respect to its stem cell origin, and that some patients with complete clinical remissions retain clonal hematopoiesis. These findings have great clinical importance for understanding the nature of leukemia and the possibilities for cure of the disease.
Even today, other groups using highly sophisticated techniques for studying DNA have not been able to provide data on cell lineage relationships and the stem cell origin of leukemias to supplant Fialkow’s pioneering studies.
Fialkow was also known for his commitment to encouraging and supporting student research and nurturing the development of future generations of physician scientists.
Philip and Helen Fialkow are survived by their two children, Michael, a fourth-year student at the UW School of Medicine, and Deborah, who also lives in the Seattle area.
