Harold Ginsberg, NIH Researcher, 85

[DGH]

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Harold Ginsberg, a retired university professor who was an infectious
diseases researcher with the National Institutes of Health from 1993
to 2000, died February 2, 2003, at his home in Woods Hole,
Massachusetts, with pneumonia, at the age of 85.

Dr. Ginsberg, who also had maintained a home in Bethesda, Maryland,
since moving to the Washington DC area in 1992, spent a half-century
studying infectious diseases, focusing on adenovirus infections. His
NIH research was on the simian AIDS virus.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute
of Medicine. Over the years, he chaired the American Academy of
Microbiology's board of governors and was president of both the Harvey
Society and the American Society for Virology.

Dr. Ginsberg, the author of a microbiology textbook and more than 200
scientific papers, was a consultant to NASA, the Army Chemical Corps
and the American Cancer Society.

Dr. Ginsberg, a Florida native, was a 1937 graduate of Duke University
and a 1941 graduate of Tulane University's medical school. He served
with the Army in Europe during World War II and received the Legion of
Merit for research he did at an Army hospital.

He was an associate at the Rockefeller Institute from 1946 to 1951,
then served on the medical faculty of the old Western Reserve
University in Cleveland until 1960. For the next 13 years, he taught
at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school, where he also had
chaired the Microbiology Department. From 1973 until retiring in 1997,
he taught at Columbia University's medical school, where he had
chaired its microbiology department from 1973 to 1985.