Polio Virus Pioneer Dr. Frank Gollan, Wife, Suicide Victims

MIAMI — The deteriorating health of a medical pioneer who isolated a polio virus and developed a heart-lung machine led him and his wife to their double suicide, according to a note found at their home.

Dr. Frank Gollan, 78, and his wife, Alice, 81, died sometime between Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon, said their son, Andy Gollan.

Frank Gollan left a note explaining that they both were despondent about their failing health.

Gollan had undergone two spinal operations in the last four years, had a tumor removed from his brain and suffered a heart attack. Alice Gollan was blind and had Alzheimer’s disease. She could not walk by herself.

The note also left instructions that they were to be cremated and their ashes spread over the ocean.

“It was well-prepared. My father was, after all, a man of medicine. He knew exactly what to do,” Gollan said.

He said he believes that his father and stepmother each took an overdose of pills because they were not as afraid of dying as they were that one might die and leave the other alone.

Frank Gollan was the first researcher to isolate the MM polio virus that caused one strain of the disease, and he also developed an early heart-lung machine in the 1950s.

Dr. George Irvin, professor of surgery at the University of Miami, said Gollan had polio as a child and was determined to find a cure.

Gollan was born in Czechoslovakia, escaped the Nazis in 1938 and fled to Cleveland, where he began his American medical career.