Eugene Goldwasser Dies

Eugene Goldwasser, who isolated and purified erythropoietin in the 1970s, has died, reports The New York Times. He was 88. It later became the basis of Amgen, and the company has made billions of dollars on the anemia drug. "It just continually delighted him that the work he did ended up having an impact on patients," Gary Toback, a colleague of Goldwasser's at the University of Chicago, tells the Times. Neither Goldwasser nor the University of Chicago patented Epo and Goldwasser later told a university publicist that "one percent of one percent of the drug's annual revenues would have funded my lab quite handsomely." Amgen cloned — and patented — the Epo gene. In a 1996 essay, Goldwasser wrote that "the enormous clinical success of Epo still astonishes me."