Bernard Lown, Harvard cardiologist and antiwar activist, dead at 99

BOSTON — Bernard Lown, a Harvard University cardiologist who invented the first effective heart defibrillator, died Tuesday in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He was 99.

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Lown’s death was confirmed by his granddaughter, Ariel Lown Lewiton, The New York Times reported. Lewiton said her grandfather had experienced complications from congestive heart failure and pneumonia, the newspaper reported.

Lown was a social activist, founding Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1960 and later co-founding International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in the 1980s, according to The Associated Press.

The latter organization won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its campaign against nuclear war.

In 1962, the Lithuanian-born Lown developed a new method for correcting dangerously abnormal heart rhythms, the Times reported. By using a precisely timed jolt of direct current electricity, Lown’s defibrillator was able to restore heartbeats to normal levels, the newspaper reported.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is perhaps the most prominent beneficiary of the defibrillator, the Times reported.

In 1980, seven American and Soviet physicians, including Lown and Yevgeny I. Chazov, a Russian cardiologist and personal doctor to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, founded International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Campaigning against nuclear testing and the arms race, the group had gathered 135,000 members in 41 countries by 1985, according to the Times.

In a 2008 memoir, “Prescription for Survival: A Doctor’s Journey to End Nuclear Madness,” Lown recalled the story of his anti-nuclear group and wrote that the end of the Cold War had not ended the threat of annihilation.

“Eliminating the nuclear menace,” Lown wrote, “is a historic challenge questioning whether we humans have a future on planet Earth.”

Lown was born in Utena, Lithuania, on June 7, 1921, and moved in 1935 with his father to Lewiston, Maine, the AP reported. A bridge was renamed in his honor in 2008, when then-Maine Gov. John Baldacci renamed the span crossing the Androscoggin River between Lewiston and Auburn the Bernard Lown Peace Bridge, the Bangor Daily News reported.

Lown’s father ran a shoe factory in Pittsfield, Maine, and Lown spent his teen years in Lewiston, where he graduated from high school in 1938, the Daily News reported.

Lown graduated from the University of Maine, where he received a bachelor’s degree in zoology, the newspaper reported. He received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The University of Maine’s Alumni Humanitarian Award is named for Lown. He won the inaugural award in 1988.

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