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Last spring, as he neared his 96th birthday, Dr. Eugene Braunwald was asked to share his memories about the evolution of studying heart disease in women.

The request came from Dr. Stacey Rosen, then the incoming president of the ������Ƶ, as she prepared her presidential address on the subject for the organization’s flagship conference.

They’d never met. Still, Braunwald – widely considered “the father of modern cardiology” – was eager to help. So eager that he refused to rely on memory. He did homework, pulling off his shelf a 1956 textbook, flipping to a particular page about “endocrine factors,” copying it and scribbling brackets around three sections.

Braunwald and Rosen spoke for about 90 minutes. He delivered all sorts of insight and wisdom. Then he started asking her questions – sharp, probing ones. Forget his age and stature; this was a relentless scientific investigator still filled with intellectual curiosity.

“All I wanted to do was copy down every word he said – and he wanted to make it a conversation,” Rosen said, smiling at the memory. “It was so inspiring, so admirable. What a special mind.”

Braunwald died peacefully Wednesday, April 22, at a Boston-area hospital. A private service is being planned, with a public memorial to be held later.

In the cardiology world, there was no bigger name than Eugene Braunwald.

To those unfamiliar with his work, it’s perhaps best framed this way: While it’s a coincidence that Braunwald began his career at the same time that the death rate from cardiovascular diseases began improving, the fact that progress accelerated in the ensuing decades is definitely not a coincidence.

“He had both direct and indirect effects on the improvements in all aspects of cardiovascular care – heart failure, hypertension, coronary artery disease, valvular heart disease and more,” said Dr. Elliott Antman, who went from being one of Braunwald’s protégés to being a very close collaborator and friend.

“There are many individuals who are fantastic scientists, excellent mentors, make groundbreaking scientific discoveries or publish a lot of papers – but to have a single person encompass all of those profoundly important aspects is astounding.”

Braunwald’s status as a legend is irrefutable. Consider:

• While the textbook he shared with Rosen was the standard when Braunwald was in school, a new standard arrived in 1980. It’s known as “Braunwald’s Heart Disease,” and he frequently revised it. So Braunwald literally wrote the book about cardiology. And that came 13 years into his tenure as editor of the primary textbook about internal medicine.
• In 2000, all living Nobel Prize winners in medicine or physiology were asked, “Who has contributed the most to the practice of cardiology in recent years?” Only one name appeared in every response: Braunwald.
• He in the scientific journal Heart Rhythm in April 2026 – 72 years after his first publication. In between, he published over 1,800 articles in his career. But it’s not just volume; he’s the most-cited researcher in his field and among the most in all of science because of the merits of those works.

Perhaps the only person who ever tamped down the canonization of Dr. Eugene Braunwald was Gene himself. Two years ago, he told the Association, “Maybe I've been around longer, but there are a lot of people who have made major contributions to cardiology.”

Yet for all his discoveries, leadership of prestigious institutions, research teams and organizations and, of course, work with patients, Braunwald’s greatest joy was mentoring.

He directly guided thousands of medical professionals and indirectly guided countless more through his writings and lectures. Even though Rosen’s interactions included just one phone call and a few emails, she considers it “a highlight of my career.”

“He was very proud of his scientific accomplishments, but if you asked him what gave him the most joy, he’d say it was all the people whose lives and careers he touched and their success,” said Antman, who began working for Braunwald as a cardiology fellow at Harvard’s training hospital in 1977, joined the staff in 1980 and has worked there ever since. He’s also served as president of the Association and remains a clinical science advisor.

Antman described Braunwald’s mentoring style as offering firm, constructive guidance. He drew out the best in people because they never wanted to let him down. His advice often went beyond science and medicine, offering wise counsel on career moves and more personal concerns.

In 1999, the Association created an award for academic mentors. Braunwald was both the first recipient and its namesake.

“He wanted people to be better than he was, even though we all knew it wasn’t possible,” said Nancy Brown, the Association’s CEO. “That was Gene.”

Brown isn’t a scientist, yet she, too, benefited from his tutelage.

It began in 1996, when she took over his local Association affiliate and made some necessary but painful changes. Before Braunwald passed judgment on them, he called Brown to his office to explain her reasoning.

“He was both supportive and incisive – all in one interaction,” she said. “He wanted to understand precisely why we’d made certain decisions, then, in the softest way, he described how we could do things differently next time, so they’d be more broadly accepted.”

The encounter led to a fast friendship. Brown often thought about how he’d handle certain things. She recalled turning to him during “five or six big moments in her career.”

“We didn’t always agree, but I sought out his feedback and advice, knowing his perspective would always be illuminating,” she said. “He extended that generosity to everyone. That is why his passing has been felt so deeply, even after such a long and wonderful life.”

A childhood upended by Nazis

Eugene Braunwald was born in Vienna, Austria, on Aug. 15, 1929.

He enjoyed a happy childhood in a second-floor apartment, taking private lessons in piano and English, going to symphonies and operas (his parents met at one). Then, on March 12, 1938, the Nazis invaded Austria.

Because the family was Jewish, SS officers forced his father to sell his wholesale clothing business and give the money to the regime. One night that May, officers came to the family’s apartment. Young Gene watched from the second-floor window as his father was forced into the bed of a truck with about a dozen other men.

The next morning, Gene’s mother told an officer that her husband was more valuable to the regime alive – to run the business – than dead. They returned him hours later. Soon, the family executed a previously arranged escape plan, going to Switzerland, then London, “literally with just the shirts on our back,” Braunwald told the . Months later, they emigrated to New York.

Imagine having your world upended like that at age 9. Think about how those scars might heal, the way those wounds might shape you. For Braunwald, it stoked “an intense internal drive to focus and tackle issues, to contribute, and to share knowledge while you have the ability to do so,” his daughter Jill Braunwald Porter, a health care attorney, said in a 2024 story about her dad’s life and legacy.

Braunwald and Antman were once in Vienna attending a scientific conference. Riding in a cab from one hotel to another, Braunwald suddenly asked the driver to stop.

“He asked me to get out with him,” Antman said. “He pointed to a second-floor window and said, ‘That’s where I stood the night they took my father away.’”

Taking aim at the No. 1 killer

Heart disease became the nation’s leading killer in the early 1920s, prompting the formation of the ������Ƶ in 1924. For years, progress was slow.

Things picked up after World War II, particularly in 1948 – the year that both the federal government and the Association began funding research. That’s also the year Braunwald started at New York University School of Medicine.

Braunwald went on to graduate first in his class. A mentor steered Braunwald, his best student, toward cardiology because heart disease was the nation’s biggest health problem.

“He was drawn by the challenge,” Antman said.

Following a residency at the world-renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital, Braunwald joined the National Heart Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute), which had been founded to perform government-funded research.

In 1959, Braunwald and the institute’s chief heart surgeon identified hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a genetic condition in which part of the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick and stiff.

Until their paper, HCM was essentially an unknown entity. Today, the treatments originally suggested by Braunwald and his co-author are still widely used.

For many, this would be a career-defining moment. Braunwald was just getting started.

Breakthrough after breakthrough

In the 1960s, the going theory was that a heart attack instantly killed heart muscle, the way flipping a switch shuts off the lights. Braunwald and his colleagues showed that heart muscle died more slowly, as if using a dimmer switch.

This crucial difference meant there might be time to intervene – and, thus, keep the lights on.

Published in 1971, the idea sparked wave after wave of discoveries that transformed heart attack treatment. The evolution has been so spectacular that, today, doctors can thread a tube through a patient’s wrist, into the heart, deploy a stent to open the blockage and restore blood flow – then send the patient home the next day, sometimes even the same day.

Another gamechanger came in the mid-1980s, when Braunwald launched the Thrombolysis In Myocardial Infarction Study Group – or, as it’s better known, TIMI.

One of TIMI’s early clinical trials validated the use of a clot-busting drug to treat heart attacks and strokes. The study group also showed the benefits of cholesterol-lowering statins and of heart attack survivors taking ACE inhibitors. Both medicines are routinely prescribed today, with the clot-busting medicine also used daily in hospitals. These findings alone have improved and extended the lives of millions of people around the world.

While TIMI has completed more than 70 studies and is still going strong, equally important is the way it changed research.

“It started the entire ecosystem of massive clinical trials,” Rosen said.

Added Brown: “Gene began the evidence-based scientific era that is now expected from the field. He recognized that the better evidence that was documented about outcomes, the better patient outcomes would be.”

A towering legacy

Braunwald’s “dimmer” discovery about heart attacks came while he was creating the department of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He left there for Boston, the hub of scientific research, to become the chair in Harvard’s Department of Medicine in what is now called Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

He held that role for 24 years, turning the department into one the most revered in the country. The hospital’s 16-story building – its tallest – is called the Eugene Braunwald Tower.

Antman was training at Columbia University in New York when he heard Braunwald speak and knew he wanted to learn from him. Their relationship blossomed far beyond his wildest expectations, including co-authoring papers, co-authoring chapters in his textbook and serving as a TIMI investigator.

One time, Antman submitted to Braunwald the draft of a chapter. The pages, Antman said, completely filled a 6-inch binder and were “very, very dense with data and text, maybe 30 figures, 20-30 tables and 1,500 references.”

“After he reviewed it all, he called me into his office. He opened the book precisely to the one row on one table that I knew needed more references to support it,” Antman said. “That was the kind of scientific mind he had.”

For many years, the Antmans and Braunwalds were neighbors in Weston, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Antman recalls – more than once – going to the mailbox when Braunwald walked by, took off the headphones that were playing his beloved classical music and asked a question along the lines of: When Dr. X was speaking at the European Society of Cardiology conference in Barcelona five years ago, on the third slide, fifth column from the right – what was the value at the height of that bar?

“I learned to say, ‘I don’t recall right now, but I’ll go check,’” Antman said, laughing. “His mind was always going.”

Another example: If classical music was playing – say, while on hold during a conference call – Braunwald could name the composer and the piece. Mozart and Bach were among his favorites, particularly Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

‘I wish I could keep doing it forever’

For nine years while leading the Brigham, Braunwald also was chair of medicine at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital. He was a founding trustee, and the first chief academic officer, for the hospital system now known as Mass General Brigham.

He served as president for various specialty groups and was on the editorial boards of the New England Journal of Medicine and other premier academic journals. A 2013 biography written by Dr. Thomas Lee, another protégé, is titled “Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine.”

Braunwald also was a stickler for clearly written guidelines, which are essentially the best practices that doctors are supposed to follow when treating patients.

“He was very keen on making recommendations that were the best for public health,” Antman said.

Added Brown, with a laugh: “The last time I saw Gene, he was chatting animatedly about a document.”

Braunwald’s lengthy list of accolades includes becoming the first adult cardiologist elected to the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.), an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (Great Britain) and a member of cardiac societies in more than a dozen other countries.

He received lifetime achievement awards from the World Heart Federation, the American College of Cardiology and more. The European Society of Cardiology bestowed upon him its highest research award. Harvard named its chair in medicine for him, and several organizations named annual keynote lectures for him.

Braunwald is survived by his wife, Elaine Smith, a former chief operating officer at Brigham and Women’s; daughters Dr. Karen Braunwald, Dr. Allison Goldfine and Jill Braunwald Porter; seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

His first wife, Dr. Nina Starr Braunwald, had been his medical school classmate. She was a pioneer, too – the first woman to be a cardiac surgeon. She passed away in 1992.

For all that he accomplished over 74 years as a cardiologist, Braunwald remained focused on the future – looking forward to the next game-changing breakthrough.

“I think this is a very exciting time,” Braunwald said . “I wish I could keep doing it forever because it’s so interesting."

To honor Dr. Eugene Braunwald’s lifelong commitment to improving heart health, the ������Ƶ is creating to support cardiovascular research and advance the progress he helped lead.