Mary Ellen Avery M.D.
Dr. Mary Ellen Avery died on December 4, 2011 at the age of 84. She was best known to the world for her ground breaking research on the cause of hyaline membrane disease (later called Respiratory Distress Syndrome), an illness that claimed the lives of an estimated 10,000 infants in the United States each year. That discovery catapulted her to leadership positions in the United States and Canada and to the highest honors offered by national societies. Following her residency in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, she came to Boston in 1957 as a research fellow in neonatology with Dr. Clement Smith, Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and with Dr. Jere Mead, a professor of physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. While carrying out a literature search she had come upon an article by Dr. John Clements who was studying the effect of war gases...