The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Diane Drobnis Rosenberg. She had squamous cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer.
When Dr. Rosenberg decided to specialize in human genetics in the early 1960s, motivated by his detective expertise diagnosing rare inherited disorders in children, the field barely existed. It was generally considered a niche, a minor part of medicine, hardly worth pursuing for an ambitious young medical scientist.
“Medical Genetics? There is no such field!” a Yale University nephrologist told him.
Nevertheless, Dr. Rosenberg became a leading figure in what is now an expanding field of study, conducting influential research on metabolic disorders and training generations of scientists. In a five-decade teaching career, he started at Yale, veered into the pharmaceutical industry, and spent nearly 20 years at Princeton University, teaching undergraduates and then reshaping the high school science curriculum at Princeton Day School. before retiring in 2018.
“He really was a visionary who recognized long, long before almost everyone else that genetics, and now genomics, would play a self-sustaining role in medicine,” said his former doctoral student Huntington F. Willard, a geneticist and scientific director of Genome Medical. “Almost everything has at least some connection to genetics and genomics, and he saw that human genetics couldn’t be under another wing. He deserved to be alone.”
Dragging between hospital and lab, Dr. Rosenberg treated patients like Robby, a comatose 8-month-old boy. In the late 1960s, he diagnosed Robby with methylmalonic acidemia, or MMA, in which the body struggles to break down certain fats and proteins, and developed a new way to control the disorder through vitamin B12 supplementation. He continued to invoke Robby’s name for decades, telling students the story of his former patient while declaring that clinical care and scientific research were inextricably linked.
“He was an extraordinary teacher,” he said. Harold T Shapiro, a Princeton economist and former university president who helped recruit Dr. Rosenberg to the school. “He was tireless,” Shapiro added, “in his willingness to talk at length with students” about medical careers.
Despite a busy schedule, Dr. Rosenberg suffered from periods of great depression, which he revealed in a 2002 essay: “Brainsick,” which was published in the journal Cerebrum and extracted by baltimore sun. Even counting some 300 scientific papers, it was perhaps the most important thing he published, he said.
As Dr. Rosenberg revealed in the essay and self-published memoir, “Genes, Medicine, Moods,” he attempted to treat his depression with Prozac before attempting suicide in 1998, when he began teaching at Princeton.
Carried to the hospital by his wife and one of their daughters, he was examined by one of his former Yale students, a doctor. “No one will believe that you, of all people, would try to take your own life,” the doctor told him.
Dr. Rosenberg was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and said he came to realize that he was “sick” when he tried to kill himself.
“I view my suicide attempt as the end result of mental illness in the same way that I view a heart attack as the end result of coronary artery disease,” he wrote. “Both are life-threatening, both have known risk factors, both are major public health concerns, both are treatable and preventable, and both create fear and pain. But the shame associated with them differs greatly. Heart attack victims are comforted (‘Isn’t that a pity?’); suicide victims are cursed (‘How could he?’)”.
Treated with electroconvulsive therapy and put on a low dose of lithium, he said he no longer experienced depression and his professional productivity had not diminished. With the support of his psychiatrist, his colleagues and his wife, he began to speak openly about his diagnosis, feeling, as his wife put it in a telephone interview, “that mental illness was being swept under the rug. of the carpet”.
At times, he would present his case history to his students, bringing some of them to tears as he talked about his suicide attempt and bipolar disorder.
“It makes no sense to allow stigma, whose underlying premise is that people with mental illness are weak, to intimidate affected people from being willing to be diagnosed,” he wrote in the essay. “It’s time for me and other doctors to say so.”
The second of three children, Leon Emanuel Rosenberg was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on March 3, 1933, and grew up in the nearby town of Waunakee. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; his father ran a general store and his mother was a homemaker.
“He told me his mother had a deformed thumb, she had been in an accident,” his wife said. “All his childhood, he wanted to be a surgeon so he could fix it.”
Dr. Rosenberg graduated summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin in 1954 and received his medical degree from the university in 1957, completing his clerkship at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. He worked for six years at the National Cancer Institute, where he began treating children with rare genetic disorders, before joining the Yale faculty in 1965.
By 1972, he had become the founding chair of the school’s human genetics department. He later served as president of the American Society for Human Genetics and, in 1981, made headlines when he defended abortion rights at a Senate subcommittee hearing.
Invited to testify about an anti-abortion bill with seven other doctors, Dr. Rosenberg was the only doctor to condemn the proposed legislation, according to a New York Times report. In a rebuke to his colleagues, he said there was no scientific evidence that human life begins at conception and insisted that scientists who claimed otherwise had been victims of “personal bias.”
“Don’t ask science and medicine to help justify” the abortion ban, he said. told the committee, “because they can not. Ask your conscience, your minister, your priest, your rabbi, or even your God, for it is in his domain that this matter resides.” The bill died before reaching the full Senate.
Beginning in 1984, Dr. Rosenberg served as dean of Yale Medical School, leading an institution of more than 900 full-time faculty while raising money, recruiting faculty, and launching a new Office of Minority Affairs, part of his effort to support and strengthen the number of non-white students and teachers in the school. He left after seven years to become the scientific director of Bristol-Myers Squibb.
The job offered him the opportunity to help develop new medical treatments and foster links between academia and the pharmaceutical industry. But he “found that the culture of business was not as comfortable as that of academia,” he recalled in an autobiographical essay, “and barely managed to reach mandatory retirement at age 65.” He was soon hired at Princeton as a senior molecular biologist and professor.
Dr. Rosenberg’s honors included the Kober Medal from the American Medical Association.
His marriage to Elaine Lewis ended in divorce. In 1979, he married Diane Drobnis, a medical journal and textbook editor, with whom he wrote a textbook of his own, “Human Genes and Genomes.”
In addition to his wife, of Lawrenceville, there are three surviving children from his first marriage, Robert Rosenberg of Reading, Pennsylvania, Diana Clark of North Clarendon, Vt. and David Korish from San Jose, Costa Rica; a daughter from his second marriage, Alexa Rosenberg of Washington; a brother; six grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
Addressing the American Society of Human Genetics after being elected president of the group, Dr. Rosenberg addressed his “weary, wary, and worried” colleagues and offered some professional and life advice:
“When your experiments don’t work, or your grant deadline is approaching, or your patients seem ungrateful, don’t download yourself for [your young colleagues]. Lock yourself in the closet, jog, complain to your partner, have a beer, but don’t scare the kids. They may take you seriously. If you must tell it like it is, be sure to devote equal time to the privileges and pleasures of academic life, to the dazzling sense of well-being that follows a scientific discovery, and to the excitement that each of us knows lies beyond. our current horizons.