In the 1950s Denham Harman posited that the effects of aging might be under humans’ control more than previously suspected. His theories would not be proved until electron beam scanning technology was invented in the 1980s, but his research revealed the importance of antioxidants in slowing the aging process and guided others in their research into the causes of cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.
Harman, MD ’54, died November 25 in Omaha, Neb., after a brief illness. He was 98.
Born in San Francisco on Valentine’s Day in 1916, he was just 4 years old when he decided he wanted his own library card. He asked his parents to teach him to write his name and then marched down to the library to secure the card. The next year, he signed himself up for kindergarten. Harman’s early love of learning led him to study chemistry—he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from UC-Berkeley.
Before enrolling at Stanford Medical School, Harman worked as a research scientist for Shell Oil Co., where he developed more than 30 patented formulas related to fuel products, insecticides and chemical preservation. His work introduced him to free radicals, compounds that play a significant role in many chemical breakdowns.
Harman questioned whether these destructive compounds might also be present in living organisms, and he hypothesized that they contribute to the aging process. In 1954 he published “Free Radical Theory of Aging,” a paper that explained the link between free radicals and aging and age-related diseases.
Harman joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1958, helping establish and then running the country’s first biomedical gerontology program. Later he helped found both the American Aging Association and the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology. His insistence that caring for the elderly required its own subsection of internal medicine brought him numerous honors, including six Nobel Prize nominations and an invitation to chair a committee for the 1981 White House Conference on Aging.
Harman continued to work four days a week for 24 years following his “retirement” in 1986. “A lot of people have jobs that they like, but he truly lived and breathed it—it was everything to him,” said his daughter, Robin. “He worked as long as he did not because he needed to but because he wanted to.” A quiet, modest man and lifelong learner, Harman had an abiding curiosity in the world around him from groundbreaking research that once prompted him to dash to the lab in the middle of a symphony performance to teaching himself the basics of languages that might facilitate his international work.
Besides his daughter, Harman is survived by his wife of 71 years, Helen; sons, Doug, David and Mark; four grandchildren; and his sister, Marjorie, MA ’59.
Hannah I.T. Brown is a Stanford intern.
