It was all Mom's fault. That was the prevailing scientific wisdom on children's behavior when Anneliese Korner began her research at Stanford in the 1960s. Her work found that a mixture of genetics and environmental influences make kids who they are. She published three books and more than 200 articles on such topics and then, in the last decade of her life, wrote an utterly different book. Across the Street From Adolf Hitler was a memoir about growing up near Hitler's residence in Munich.
Korner, a professor emerita at the Stanford School of Medicine, died on March 4 at her home in Palo Alto. She was 91.
Frightened by an episode in which their daughter was interrogated by the Gestapo, Korner's parents sent her to Switzerland when she was 16. In Geneva, Korner was influenced by psychologists Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and Anna Freud.
In the early 1960s, Korner approached the chair of psychiatry at Stanford about her interest in studying infants. "What I wanted to do," she said in a 2002 interview, "was to find out how it all starts." She branched out into studying interventions that would help the tiniest preterm babies and developed a neurobehavioral assessment tool used on preemies around the world.
One line of Korner's inquiry found that premature babies placed on gently vibrating waterbeds had fewer breathing and heart-rate problems. An early version of this research involved swaddling and rocking newborn rats as stand-ins for babies. "I still get the giggles visualizing Anneliese and her partner, Dr. Evelyn Thoman, swaddling those little rats and putting them in mechanical rocking chairs," said Helena Kraemer, professor emerita and a longtime friend.
Korner, who was also known by the name Korner-Kalman, is survived by her daughter, Sue Kalman, and grandsons Joseph and David Persico. Her husband, Sumner "Kal" Kalman, MD '51, a professor emeritus of pharmacology, died in 1992.
