In Memory of Athinoula

On a Friday afternoon in 1976, while on vacation on the small but inviting island of Nantucket, Dr. Daniel C. Shannon received an urgent phone call from Thanassis Martinos, the 26-year-old son of a prominent shipping family in Greece. A godchild, the daughter of one of Martinos’ ships’ captains, was critically ill with heart and lung failure and in a coma and he asked if Shannon might be able to help.

Shannon, the director of Pediatric Intensive Care at Massachusetts General Hospital and a founding faculty member of the MIT-Harvard Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program, said he would do whatever he could. He flew to Athens the next day. By late Sunday, he and the child were back in Boston, where she was admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit for diagnosis and treatment. Within two weeks, thanks in large part to the excellent care she received at Mass General, she was back home in Greece, where she was able to resume a happy, healthy life.

The story’s happy ending is a welcome one. But the child’s recovery wasn’t the only important outcome of the otherwise terrifying ordeal. Through the shared experience, Thanassis Martinos and his wife Marina forged a deep and lasting friendship with Shannon, a friendship that would only grow stronger over the years and decades to come.

In 1997, Thanassis and Marina’s oldest daughter, Athinoula, passed away at the age of 24, after years of struggling with mental health issues. Devastated, the Martinos’ turned to Shannon for counsel. Shannon had also lost a daughter and they asked how he had coped with the unimaginable grief.

Their old friend told them he had honored his daughter’s memory by establishing a research scholarship fund for young women at the college she had attended. He suggested they consider setting up a scholarship fund in Athinoula’s name to support the research, study and training of students in the Health Sciences and Technology program. The Martinos’ agreed that this would be a fitting tribute to their daughter and, in partnership with HST, created a fund. The first ten students in the Athinoula A. Martinos Research Scholarship program were announced at the 1997 HST Research Forum at MIT.

After seeing the undeniable impact of the scholarship fund, Thanassis and Marina Martinos decided they wanted to do more. Specifically, they wanted to support more directly research that would advance understandings of neurological disorders and how better to address those disorders. In 1999, they presented a gift of $20 million to the Harvard- MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology to facilitate development of cutting-edge neuroimaging and other biomedical imaging technologies and fostering multidisciplinary research using those technologies, bridging areas from hardware development to the basic biosciences to clinical investigation.

HST, in turn, invited Massachusetts General Hospital to participate in the founding of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, combining the clinical and imaging expertise and extensive imaging facilities of the existing MGH-NMR Center with HST’s strengths in engineering and basic neuroscience and the resources represented by the Martinos family gift.

The Martinos Center officially launched in November 2000 under the leadership of NMR Center director Bruce Rosen and with a faculty of approximately forty investigators and more than $23 million in existing biomedical imaging equipment. The Center was housed on the MGH research campus in the Charlestown Navy Yard, by then the longtime home of the NMR Center, with a satellite facility on the MIT campus providing MIT researchers with access to cutting-edge imaging technologies and thus enabling important, complementary work in normal, healthy populations.

While the members of the Center continued to occupy much of Building 149 in the Navy Yard, the Martinos gift enabled the purchase of Building 75 across the street, which would nearly double the Center’s footprint and allow a significant expansion of its research portfolio.

Martha Gray, co-director of HST from 1995 to 2008, who was instrumental in the creation of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging as well as the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the MIT McGovern Institute, reflects on the researchers’ many successes in the 20 years since the Center’s launch.

“What’s amazing to me about the work they have done is, they have a very holistic view of the opportunities afforded by imaging writ large,” she says today. “They don’t stick with any one kind of imaging. They use whatever tools are available to understand what’s happening in disease, and neurological disease in particular, so we can ultimately change the course of disease. They have opened our eyes to the world of possibilities. Without imaging, and the types of imaging they have introduced, we really are blind.”

Rosen, in turn, looks back on the days when he and Gray and others were envisioning the shape of a new, integrated MIT-MGH imaging center and ultimately putting their plans into practice, not least with the purchase and overhaul of Building 75 in the Navy Yard.

“It was a heady time, to be sure,” he says. “Having the ability to purchase our own building and put our imprimatur on it reflected a measure of independence and arrival, and it gave us the space to break new ground in our research and strike out in new directions.”

In this sense, and in many others, the heady time continues to this day.