CLASSNOTES C O M P I L E D B Y L I B B Y E D WA R D S
Dr. Lane (right) poses with colleagues Dr. J. Donald Millar and Dr. William H. Foege while holding a copy of World Health, the magazine of the World Health Organization, in May 1980.
I N M E M O R I A M | D R. J . M I C H A E L L A N E ’53
‘Smallpox Warrior’ Led Fight to Eradicate Disease
A
BRUNSWICK ALUMNUS who
deadly, and disfiguring infec-
virus that had haunted humankind
helped lead the global fight to erad-
tious disease that once afflicted
for thousands of years.
icate smallpox died Oct. 21, 2020, at
millions. In the 20th century
his Atlanta home.
alone, the virus killed upwards of
achievements, but according to
300 million people.
Lane’s New York Times obituary, the
Epidemiologist J. Michael Lane ’53, M.D. was 84. He was an English major at Yale University before
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s,
It was one of humanity’s greatest
occasion passed largely unno-
going on to Harvard for medical training and the
Lane, his colleagues, and an army
ticed — perhaps because the virus
University of California, Berkeley for a master of
of public-health volunteers worked
was so little seen at the time. The
public health degree in epidemiology in 1967.
to establish worldwide surveillance
last natural case of smallpox was
systems to watch for outbreaks,
recorded three years earlier, in
Lane joined the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention Epidemic Intelligence Service in 1963. He spent the ensuing decades traveling the globe in pursuit of a singular goal — exterminating the worldwide scourge of smallpox, the ancient,
70 | TIMES
OF BRUNSWICK • SPRING 2021
teach prevention and quarantine techniques, and set up vaccination programs. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Organization officially declared freedom from a
Somalia; in the United States, the last outbreak occurred decades before, in 1949. Lane’s death, in the midst of the first pandemic in a century, was observed in newspapers and