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Previous winners: 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 |2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 2007
Dr. Donald R. Roberts
Dr. Roberts is Professor Emeritus at the Edward F. Hebert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Md.; chair of the World Health Organization's Working Group on Indoor Residual Spraying; a member of the External Scientific Advisory Committee of the Gates Foundation's Innovative Vector Control Consortium; and a member of the Board of Directors for Africa Fighting Malaria.
Dr. Roberts was drafted into the Army in 1966 and retired from his position as a tenured professor at USUHS this summer. In the 41-year interim, he served in an Army preventive medicine unit in Thailand, conducted field research on malaria in Brazil, ran the Department of Entomology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in Washington, D.C. and collaborated with his USUHS research team to develop laboratory assays that screen chemicals for their behavioral actions. While malaria was at the center of Dr. Roberts' research from the very beginning, as his career progressed he became more focused on the behavioral responses of mosquitoes to a controversial chemical-Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT. By demonstrating that DDT can be safely and effectively used to repel mosquitoes from homes, and by trying to deliver this message to malariologists and policy makers, Dr. Roberts has been on a mission to reverse global policy that has been against DDT. This mission has recently borne fruit: last September, the WHO abandoned its 30-year anti-DDT policy and endorsed indoor spraying in its fight against malaria, a disease that kills more than one million people worldwide every year.
"It's certainly been growing," Dr. Roberts said of the number of his colleagues who are beginning to advocate for the use of DDT. "And what helps us is that every place that it's used, it proves to be remarkably effective. When South Africa restarted its use of DDT [in 2001], it dropped the malaria rates 80 per cent within just the first few months."
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 2006
Dr. Norman M. Rich
Dr. Rich is Deputy Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Md.; Leonard Heaton and David Packard Professor of Surgery at USUHS; Director, Vietnam Vascular Registry, USUHS and Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C.; and Co-Director Emeritus, Vascular Surgery Fellowship, WRAMC A military surgeon and professor with 46 years of experience, Dr. Rich went to the Vietnam War as a young surgeon and has continued to expand that experience through his development of the Vietnam Vascular Registry. During his tour of duty in An Khe as surgery chief of the 2nd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) in 1965-1966, he performed advanced battlefield artery repairs and other surgeries and began to document everything he saw and did. This documentation of wounds and surgeries became a lifetime commitment with the registry, which has allowed him and other military surgeons to study the management and results of battlefield trauma care, and has led to advancements in Desert Storm and the Iraq War. “When I first went to Vietnam, I didn’t understand the wounding power of missiles very well, so I developed an early interest in wound ballistics,” Dr. Rich explained.
Later on, he was involved in International Committee of the Red Cross activities and the evaluation of wounded on the battlefield. “I had great exposure to many of the experienced people—civilian as well as military—all over the world,” he said. “I’ve had a very privileged opportunity to have been in 35 countries, foreign exchanges and I was able also to bring many of these individuals to the Uniformed Services University and give them the opportunity to see what we were doing here.”
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 2005
Dr. Donald Lindberg
Dr. Lindberg,Director of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., has spent the last 20 years cementing the National Library of Medicine's (NLM's) place in the world as the premier organization for medical information and computing, and the prior 20 years fostering the use of information technology in clinical practice and medical research. His leadership and foresight have helped keep NLM one step ahead of the demands of research and medicine, making it the world's largest library of health sciences and a highly respected source of information for physicians, researchers and the general public.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 2004
Although all of this year's nominees were worthy and deserving candidates, the winner of the 2004 Frank Brown Berry Prize In Federal Healthcare is Capt. Marlene DeMaio, MC, USNR, for her invaluable research on measuring the effectiveness of body armor vests that are now in use by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her biomechanical studies and ballistic analyses using the latest measuring equipment available compared three sets of vests and has led to the validation and setting of a modern military protective standard, as well as energized the field of body armor research.
An orthopedic surgeon and the former department head of orthopedics at the Naval Medical Clinic in Annapolis, Md., Dr. DeMaio first got the idea of improving military body armor while working in the early to mid-'90s at the Naval Hospital in Oakland where some of her patients were Navy SEALS. She was amazed to learn from them that they would often remove their protective equipment because they found it cumbersome and noisy while they were trying to carry out their missions.
Motivated by the wisdom that investing in preventive medicine becomes invaluable on the health care side, and utilizing knowledge gained in her subspecialty of sports medicine, Dr. DeMaio galvanized the military research community into collaborating on a study from 1998-2000 that measured the impact of various weaponry on body armor using a cadaver model.
The Interceptor Body Armor in use today has since saved countless lives by offering chest and back protection against AK-47 and heavier rounds.
Since serving as the principal investigator of the validation study, Dr. DeMaio continues today to consult on other body armor studies, one of which is studying the feasibility of arm and leg protections. She further is recognized as an excellent clinician and has been sought out by such patients as former President Bill Clinton and current deputy secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize for 2004 is co-sponsored by the Delta Dental Plan of California.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 2003
U.S. Medicine is proud to announce that Dr. Kent R. Murphy, director and
founder of the Center of Excellence for Medical Multimedia (CEMM) at the
Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., has been selected as this
year’s winner of the Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Healthcare.
The Berry Prize, bestowed annually in August, recognizes a federal medical provider for his or her significant contribution to medicine, and 2003’s Berry Prize winner fits this criterion in numerous areas. Dr. Murphy has pioneered the use of "Information Therapy," the practice of empowering patients with knowledge about their ailments, to level the playing field between health care practitioners and the patient. CEMM was founded on the principle that patients have the right to receive information about their ailments, possible complications to standard treatments, and information about alternative treatments.
Since receiving a grant from the Air Force surgeon general’s office in 1997, Dr. Murphy and his colleagues have built CEMM from a janitor’s closet-sized operation into a $7 million program that won 30 international awards last year. Today, CEMM has partnerships with more than 150 contractors and medical experts around the world to create some of the most advanced health education materials on a variety of platforms, including CD/DVD-ROM, video and the Internet. Rather than merely producing dry educational materials, CEMM has married cutting-edge medical technology to "Hollywood style" production values to bring the most effective, engaging and "soulful" products to the end-user.
As a founding member of the American Academy of Otolaryngology Interactive Media Faculty, Dr. Murphy was the first to develop a CD-ROM in 1998 to teach other surgeons how to perform complex middle ear surgeries. The group has disseminated more than 25,000 copies. Dr. Murphy also helped to found a non-profit organization called Prorenata, which is dedicated to improving health outcomes by providing free or low-cost patient health education.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize for 2003 is co-sponsored by the Delta Dental Plan of California.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 2002
U.S. MEDICINE is proud to announce that Dr. James P. Bagian, director of the Veterans Affairs National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS) in Ann Arbor, Mich., has been selected as this year's winner of the Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Healthcare.
As director of NCPS, Dr. Bagian conceived and established a comprehensive patient safety system with a proactive approach that emphasizes prevention of healthcare errors, rather than punishment of providers, through the reporting and analyses of adverse events and close calls. When he received a call in the fall of 1997 from then-VHA undersecretary of health Dr. Ken Kizer asking him to chair a new advisory committee on patient safety, Dr. Bagian, who was interested at the time by how mistakes in medicine were being handled, seemed to catch the ball running. His committee came back with several recommendations, including the designation of a patient safety center with a dedicated staff.
VA soon announced that it would form the NCPS with Dr. Bagian as its head. Dr. Bagian immediately began to build on the committee's work, and implemented a comprehensive program in just 18 months. The program's goal has been to prevent harm to patients, not simply to prevent errors. This includes using prioritization techniques and analysis tools to find the root causes of not only medical errors and adverse events, but close calls.
Dr. Bagian wrote a patient safety handbook and dispersed it throughout VHA to gain as much feedback on the program as possible, from both proponents and detractors alike. He had work groups test the system out in desktop simulation exercises, and ran pilots in two Veterans Integrated Service Networks before rolling out the program to every hospital in VA. Under a policy in which only "intentionally" unsafe acts can lead to punishment, the reporting of adverse events increased by 30 per cent and of close calls by 900 per cent in the first year of operation alone.
The system has not only been working to transform the patient safety culture of VA, but serves as a model for the Department of Defense, private hospital groups within the U.S. and several other countries. Despite the success of the system, which also led to the correction of a design flaw in an internationally-used pacemaker after a close call was identified and reported by VA physicians, Dr. Bagian continues to strive to change the safety culture in medicine and convince people, regardless of rank or level, to speak up if they think something is unsafe or someone is doing something unsafe. "The way to think about it is, if you're not sure it's safe, it's not safe," he told U.S. MEDICINE. "It's not the other way around that you have to prove to me it's not safe before speaking up."
The next step for Dr. Bagian and NCPS is to get these patient safety lessons incorporated into medical school curriculums. The key is to train both current providers and medical students to really change the approach to patient safety and mistakes.
For the last 25 years, Dr. Bagian has been working to build improvements in federal healthcare. He fulfilled a dream when he became a flight surgeon and astronaut in the late '70s and served as NASA's lead mission specialist for the first Life Sciences Spacelab flight, in which he worked with investigators from around the world to help design and carry out experiments in space. He went on to administer, for the first time in space, promethazine intramuscularly to crew members who were suffering from space motion sickness. It remains the treatment of choice among astronauts today.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize for 2002 is co-sponsored by the Delta Dental Plan of California.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 2001
U.S. MEDICINE is proud to announce that Dr. James A. Zimble, president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, Md., has been selected as this year's winner of the Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Healthcare.
Since the beginning of Dr. Zimble's tenure at USUHS in 1991, the former Navy surgeon general has guided the university on a path to increased recognition as an invaluable training ground for military medicine. He galvanized support for USUHS on Capitol Hill and within the Pentagon during a turbulent period in which political naysayers were deriding it as a "gold-plated" recruiting station and were attempting to eliminate it. Dr. Zimble's leadership saved the university, against the odds, from closure and led it to be placed under the direct purview of the military surgeons general. The Department of Defense has since come to appreciate the university's unique role in medical education and military medicine, as well as its attraction to medical recruits. Under Dr. Zimble's guidance, USUHS has moved to a more interdisciplinary and team-oriented approach to adapt to advancing technologies and the school now offers courses in cellular molecular biology and emerging infectious diseases, which are pivotal in the education of military physicians. A new graduate school of nursing was opened in 1993 and offers degrees in anesthesiology and family practice with a focus on military medicine and opportunities to attend classes with medical students.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize for 2001 is co-sponsored by the Delta Dental Plan of California.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 2000
Dr. David Y. Graham has been named to receive the 2000 Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Medicine for his pioneering work in the treatment and cure of H. pylori infection, which causes peptic ulcer disease in millions of individuals across the globe each year.
Chief of gastroenterology at the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Dr. Graham developed the first non-invasive test for the diagnosis of active H. pylori infection and the first serological test for H. pylori based on purified bacterial antigens.
Undoing Peptic Ulcer
He and his research team also have identified the therapies most likely to cure this debilitating infection.
The 13th C-urea breath test for the non-invasive diagnosis of H. pylori infection that was developed by Dr. Graham now is used routinely worldwide. Dr. Graham and his research team have focused on therapy as well as detection, making the following important contributions to the treatment and cure of peptic ulcer disease:
- Demonstrating for the first time the phenomenon of gastric adaptation to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in humans, which also cause peptic ulcer disease.
- Demonstrating that H. pylori infection does not play a significant role in recurrent functional abdominal pain in children.
- Assessing the density and distribution of H. pylori in the stomach by gastric topography.
- Developing improved methods of staining gastric mucosa to simultaneously identify histological features and the presence of H. pylori.
- Providing the first model that links acid secretion, H. pylori and duodenal ulcer disease.
- Directing the first successful clinical trial to show that misoprostol effectively prevents nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agent-induced gastric ulcers and duodenal ulcers.
- Demonstrating that cure of H. pylori infection in patients who previously had bled from ulcers eliminates the risk of further bleeding.
Listed as one of the 50 most prominent gastroenterologists of the 20th century, Dr. Graham has received a variety of awards, including the 1995 Distinguished Achievement Award of the American College of Gastroenterology. In addition to his VA position, he is a professor of medicine and of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He continues to seek improved therapies for H. pylori infection and is working on a vaccine.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize for 2000 is co-sponsored by Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC)
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 1999
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony S. Fauci has been selected to receive the 1999 Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Medicine
Dr. Fauci is the nation's--and
likely the world's--premier expert in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
infection. At the same time that he continues his research
into HIV and AIDS, Dr. Fauci makes regular rounds at the National
Institutes of Health 
Clinical
Center, where he delivers care to AIDS patients. He is both scientist and
clinician, drawing on research to devise improved therapies, and drawing
on clinical experience to develop new research questions
As NIAID director, Dr. Fauci helps establish national research priorities on infectious diseases, including emerging microbes, the development of drug resistance and agents that could be used in bioterrorism
Understanding HIV
Dr. Fauci was among the first
to recognize the potential impact of HIV infection on public health in
the early 1980s and to begin unraveling the mechanisms by which the virus
wreaks its havoc on the human immune system, delineating the "hallmark"
functional deficit in CD4+ T cells. He also was among the first to establish
the concept that the brain serves as a reservoir for HIV
Dr. Fauci demonstrated that precursors to mature T cells are infectable with HIV--a finding that may help explain the regenerative defect in the immune system of those infected with HIV. In addition, he has demonstrated that the lymph nodes are the major reservoir of HIV and that HIV infection remains active and progressive in lymphoid tissue, even when the disease appears to be clinically latent. He also has shown that a pool of latently infected cells remains in patients treated with highly active antiretroviral therapy--even those in whom plasma virus levels are too low to be detected
Other Advances
Dr. Fauci also has made important
contributions to developing effective therapies for inflammatory diseases
such as the vasculitic syndromes--an area he considers "probably the most
important thing I've done in my career."
As director of NIAID, he focuses on global health and leads a major initiative against malaria. Under his leadership NIAID also collaborates on genomic sequencing of pathogenic microbes. "Once you have the genome, you have everything," he notes. "There isn't anything about that microbe that you can't figure out."
The Frank Brown Berry Prize for 1999 is co-sponsored by Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC)
The Frank Brown Berry Prize For 1998
Veterans Affairs cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Shukri F. Khuri has been named to receive the 1998 Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Medicine. Dr. Khuri is being recognized for significant technical advances in cardiac surgery and in assessing the quality of surgical care—advances likely to benefit patients across the globe.
Chief
of surgical services at the Brockton-West Roxbury, Mass., VA Medical Center,
Dr.
Khuri
chairs the largest open heart surgery program in the VA health care system.
He also is vice chairman of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and
a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School.
The $5,000 Berry Prize, cosponsored by U.S. MEDICINE and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), recognizes important contributions to the field of medicine that originate in the federal sector. The winner is selected by a panel of judges.
Clinical Research
For two
decades Dr. Khuri has worked to improve the care given patients undergoing
cardiac surgery, finding problems in the operating room and then devising
solutions to them. Among his most significant accomplishments:
- Development of the Khuri pH monitor, which measures how well the heart is being protected from irreversible damage when it is stopped for a surgical procedure. The monitor assesses acid balance of deeper, more vulnerable heart tissue and takes temperature readings. It has been given approval by the Food and Drug Administration but is not yet available commercially.
- Determining a compendium of techniques
that can conserve blood following cardiopulmonary bypass procedures. His
own unit has decreased the magnitude of postoperative bleeding by almost
80 per cent in bypass patients.
Among the steps he advocates is use of heparin-coated circuits with low-dose heparin, decreasing the need for heparin during surgery. Heparin is a blood-thinning agent which contributes to postoperative bleeding.
Dr. Khuri delineated these blood conservation techniques in collaboration with the Naval Blood Research Laboratory in Boston.
Quality
Assessment
In 1987,
Dr. Khuri was asked to chair a committee that would assess VA surgical
outcomes in comparison to national averages, but risk-adjusted for the
severity of illness. Congress, in fact, had mandated that such an assessment
be done—but when Dr. Khuri took charge of the project there were no models
for risk assessment and no standards for surgical outcomes on which he
could draw.
Dr. Khuri’s committee began a national surgical risk study, collecting preoperative, intraoperative and outcomes data. The results of this study led to development of a formula for measuring the quality of care, the O/E (observed -to-expected) ratio.
The model, which has been incorporated into a National Surgical Quality Improvement Program in VA, is considered to be the leading paradigm in the nation for quantifying the quality of surgery.
Remarks by Dr. Shukri F. Khuri
The Frank Brown Berry Prize for 1998 is co-sponsored by Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC)
Capt. David M. Harlan, left, and Dr. Carl H. June have been awarded the inaugural Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Medicine for their work in t-cell manipulation at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. Drs. Harlan and June have identified and are working with two t-cell "switches" , CD 28 and its counter-receptor, B7, focusing on three areas: stem cell biology, immune augmentation and immune suppression.
Using t-cell clones, the researchers have shown that preventing signaling through CD28 renders t-cells inactive toward the antigen they otherwise would
This "anergy therapy" approach might also block the immune responses in other important instances: for burn patients, for example, who cannot undergo skin transplants because they cannot undergo immunosuppression, and for xenotransplantations, that is, use of organs from other species. In addition, anergy therapy could be used on the battlefield, where treatment options are limited, to allow unrelated organ transplants.
On the flip side of immune research, Drs. Harlan and June are studying tel-cell augmentation, particularly as it relates to HIV infection. They have found that stimulating t-cells to grow via CD28 and another molecule made the cells resistant to a common strain of HIV. The exact mechanism of action was found to be the inactivation of CCR5, one of the t-cells' co-receptors. This finding could lead to new drugs that prevent CCR5 expression.
In addition to their research advances, Drs. Harlan and June have been honored for transferring their findings to industry.
In the words of one of the judges for the Berry Prize, the work being done by Drs. Harlan and June "may prove to be revolutionary in future approaches to rejection prevention of transplants organs, including both allografts and xenografts. Further, the targeted manipulation of t-cell activation or suppression may permit the improved treatment of autoimmune disorders, lymphocytotrophic retroviral infections and many other immune-mediated disorders. It is possible that t-cell manipulation may also be used to enhance clearance of certain viruses and even fungi that commonly infect humans and mammals."
Dr. Harlan is director of the Immune Cell Biology Program at the Naval Medical Research Institute. Dr. June, who headed that program during his years on active duty in the Navy, currently is with the Military HIV Research Program and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine.
The Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal Medicine honors the late Dr. Frank B. Berry, who served as assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and as editorial advisor to U.S. MEDICINE during its formative years. Judges for the prize were drawn from the Veterans Health Administration, National Institutes of Health, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and U.S. MEDICINE.
The Frank Brown Berry
Prize for 1997 is co-sponsored by Science Applications International Corp.
(SAIC)
The Frank
Brown Berry Prize For 1997
have recognized, a finding which has been used by other researchers to demonstrate the ability to transplant human insulin-producing cells in mice without an immune response. Drs. Harlan and June now report similar results with renal allografts in monkeys. This successful bypassing of immune mechanisms "clearly demonstrates that allograft tolerance might be an achievable goal in humans using this or a similar therapeutic approach," Drs. Harlan and June observe.
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