(Hypertension. 2000;36:1.)
© 2000 American Heart Association, Inc.
In Memoriam |
Janice M. Pfeffer, PhD
1 Editor-in-Chief
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Introduction |
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This communication celebrates the remarkable life of Jan Pfeffer: a diligent, dedicated, and hard-working scientist; a loving mother and wife; a warm and deeply caring student, friend, and colleague; and an unfatigable fighter of an unrelenting illness.
Janice M. Sikorski came to the University of Oklahoma in 1969 as a recent graduate of Rockford College with Marc A. Pfeffer, a graduate student in our Physiology Department. The chairman of that department asked me whether I had recruited a technician for my physiology laboratory, having just arrived at the medical school myself. I interviewed Jan, she immediately started in my laboratory, and that began my more than three-decade love and admiration for this remarkable woman. For seven years we worked together, laughed together, and were constantly excited together: Jan, Marc, and I. Jan ran the laboratory with care and a personal love of work.
After Marc completed his graduate work, Jan began her graduate work
with tremendous commitment. She was a diligent scholar and a careful
and precise scientist whose investigative work was never challenged and
was always reproducible. She was proud of her inseparable scholarly
productivity with her loving husband Marc, although most of her own
work was independent. Her well-designed and independently conceived
studies on the "Longitudinal Changes in Cardiac Function and Geometry
During the Natural Development of Left Ventricular
Hypertrophy in the Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat"
stimulated and provided the scientific basis for its natural extension
to the bedside: the Survival and Ventricular Enlargement
(SAVE) trial. This careful and