Aaron Bunsen Lerner, 1920-2007

While Aaron Lerner was not a chronobiologist, his discovery of the hormone melatonin in 1958 was one of the key milestones in the biological rhythm research (just see how much I mention it around here) and the chronobiological community will always regard him as one of its own.

You can learn more about melatonin here (UPI got it wrong - the discovery was not made on human skin but a skin preparation of the frog Rana pipiens).

If you are interested, here are three of the first four Lerner's papers on the discovery of Melatonin:

ISOLATION OF MELATONIN, THE PINEAL GLAND FACTOR THAT LIGHTENS MELANOCYTES (pdf)

Melatonin in Peripheral Nerve

STRUCTURE OF MELATONIN (pdf)

Aaron Lerner was also immortalized in poetry, in the 1998 collection Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics (reviewed here):

"til Aaron Lerner, awash in kilos of bovine pineals, extracted melatonin . . a hormone that did bleach tadpoles" (Roald Hoffman)

From the New York Time obituary:

Dr. Aaron B. Lerner, a Yale dermatologist and the leader of a team of researchers who discovered melatonin, a powerful hormone regulating human sleep-wake cycles, died on Feb. 3 in New Haven. He was 86.

The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his family said.

In 1958, Dr. Lerner, an expert on skin pigmentation disorders who trained in both chemistry and medicine, led a Yale team that isolated a hormone from the pineal gland within the brain.

In laboratory experiments on frogs, the researchers found that the compound could lighten skin color and theorized that it might have applications in treating human skin disorders. Dr. Lerner named the hormone melatonin, and the team's findings were announced in The Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Subsequent investigations revealed that melatonin did not hold the key to treating disruptions in skin pigmentation like vitiligo. Research by others has since uncovered the hormone's importance in maintaining the circadian rhythm of rest and wakefulness, and it is now used to treat sleeplessness and jet lag.

Dr. Lerner later developed a transplantation therapy for vitiligo, a disorder that affects about 1 percent of the population and destroys pigment-making cells. The condition may be disfiguring and leaves light-colored patches around body openings like the mouth and eyes, but does not otherwise affect someone's health. After removing a postage-stamp-size patch of a patient's normal skin, he grew the cells in culture, then transplanted them to damaged areas. The result was a more uniform complexion covering the abnormal shades of skin, and it was often accompanied by a reduction in social stigma for the patient. The technique was advanced in the 1980s and remains in use, even as vitiligo is more commonly treated by drugs and exposure to light.

In other work, Dr. Lerner isolated another compound -- melanocyte-stimulating hormone, or MSH, which he obtained from the pituitary glands of pigs -- and studied its skin-darkening effects. Earlier, while still a graduate student, he and another researcher, G. Robert Greenberg, isolated a protein that appears in the blood at low temperature, a monoclonal antibody known as a cryoglobulin.

Aaron Bunsen Lerner was born in 1920 in Minneapolis. In 1945, he received his medical degree and a doctorate in physiological and physical chemistries from the University of Minnesota. After teaching at the University of Michigan and the University of Oregon, he joined Yale as an associate professor of medicine in 1955. Dr. Lerner became the first chairman of Yale's dermatology department in 1958. He remained chairman until 1985, and was named a professor emeritus of dermatology in 1991.