BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH FOR GORDON WALKER

Tulane Medical School Class of 1951

After completing his residency training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital with one year spent at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Walker spent two years in fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a Fellow of the American Heart Association. Upon completion of his training he was appointed instructor in medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Physician at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

He under took the establishment of the renal division in the department of medicine while being supported as an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association. In 1960 he organized and became the director of the general clinical research center on Osler 5 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the first such center to be awarded and supported by a federally funded program to expand clinical research. He continued his position on the faculty of the School of Medicine, serving as assistant, associate and finally professor of medicine in 1968. He organized the first Committee on Clinical Investigation at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (several years later the National Institutes of Health mandated the creation of such committees for all universities having government supported clinical research centers and now mandated for all universities receiving funding from the U.S. Government under the title Institutional Review Board or IRB) for the purpose of evaluating the quality of proposed research on the clinical research center and for the protection of rights and safety of individuals participating in such research. He served as chairman of this committee from 1964 until 1973.

Additionally, as part of his activities as director of the renal division he was instrumental in getting legislation introduced in the Maryland House of Delegates, which proposed the creation of a Kidney Commission of Maryland and a Kidney Disease Program which was designed to create quality standards for proposed dialysis centers in the state of Maryland and cover the cost of providing such dialysis. This created an environment for making available this costly treatment to all individuals with terminal renal failure and avoided the undesirable and unethical committee action of deciding who was ‘most deserving of having their life extended’. This legislation and the companion legislation which created the first “Anatomical Gift Act” making it possible for individuals to designate postmortem use of their organs and creating an environment which fostered the growth and development of kidney transplantation were enacted by the legislature and represented the first successful attempt to establish dialysis and transplantation as an accepted part of routine medical care for renal failure. Subsequently the Blue Plans and other insurance carriers accepted these activities as legitimate medical care costs and National legislation was enacted establishing dialysis and transplantation as therapy for end stage renal disease as costs reimbursable by Medicare (or HCFA).

His initial research, begun while he was a freshman in medical school in collaboration with W. S. Wilde, Professor of Physiology, used radioactive potassium to study the kinetics of potassium in the body and provided the first measurements of the rates of exchange between intracellular potassium and potassium in the circulation. Subsequent research included observations of the site of potassium secretion within the kidney and factors influencing the renal transport of potassium and sodium. In collaboration with Richard Ross, he made early contributions to the rate of movement of large molecules across the capillary beds, using labeled proteins to provide quantitative measures of capillary permeability. Subsequent research contributions include a study of the role of potassium in the regulation of aldosterone secretion in normal man and studies of the clinical consequences of prolonged potassium depletion. In studies of factors influencing the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system in health and disease, Walker demonstrated that renin release from the kidney could be influenced by changes in sodium concentration in the distal nephron and that potassium was capable of stimulating aldosterone production independently of the renin angiotensin system. A method was also devised for the measuring of endogenous angiotensin II production in intact man, permitting the first measurements of trans-pulmonary production of Angiotensin II and measurement of the metabolic degradation rate of this hormone, both in normal man and in such abnormal states as cirrhosis of the liver.

His subsequent clinical research focused upon renal damage in hypertension and in diabetes mellitus. He was responsible for the initial observation documenting that angiotensinogen or renin substrate was correlated with blood pressure in studies of relatively large population groups and that it was elevated in hypertension. It was subsequently possible to show that this relationship was under genetic control and that one allele was apparently responsible for the “salt sensitivity” exhibited by some hypertensive patients. Walker was a member of one of the research groups responsible for this latter observation. He was also among the first to show that control of blood pressure in hypertension and in diabetes was protective against progressive renal damage when the blood pressure was controlled to ranges below 135/80mm/Hg

Walker is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Clinical and Climatological Association, The American Physiological Society, the American College of Physicians, and the American Society for Nephrology. He served as a member of the Renal Disease and Urology Training Grants Committee (1968-1972), and as chairman of the Electrolytes and Parenteral Therapy Committee for the U.S.Pharmacopeia and as a member and chairman of the General Clinical Research Center’s Advisory Committee for the Division of Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health. He also served as chairman of the ad hoc committee appointed by the Division of Research Resources for the development of the CLINFO computer software program for the Storage and analysis of clinical research data. The Program and supporting computer hardware were subsequently made available to all the general clinical research centers in U. S. medical schools.

Walker has published more than 120 articles in refereed medical journals, authored or co-authored more that 75 chapters in textbooks and monographs; has served on the editorial staff of American Journal of Medicine and of Kidney International. In addition, he has served as section editor for the section on Disorders of Water and Electrolyte Metabolism, and the section on Renal Diseases and Disturbances of Renal Function in The Principles and Practice of Medicine, 17th through the 22nd editions. His total publications exceed 350.