Sherman Mellinkoff, ‘wizard’ of UCLA medical school, dies at 96

When Franklin Murphy called Sherman Mellinkoff into his office in 1962, the chancellor of UCLA — a man determined to transform the university into an academic powerhouse — had some good news for the young assistant professor of medicine.

Congratulations, Murphy said. You’ve been promoted to associate professor, and I’m also appointing you the dean of the medical school.

Mellinkoff was taken aback, according to his friend and UCLA colleague Michael Phelps. Mellinkoff had been on campus for less than 10 years and was an internist, practiced in general medicine. Surely he was under-qualified.

He tried to argue, but Franklin — known for his ability to recognize and develop talent — was not about to be put off.

As dean of the UCLA School of Medicine for nearly 25 years, Mellinkoff — Sherm to his friends — created a world-class destination for medical education and research. He died of congestive heart failure at his home in Westwood on July 17. He was 96.

“Murphy and Sherm made UCLA into a great university,” said Alan Fogelman, chair of the department of medicine.

Under Mellinkoff’s guidance, the school developed its ambitious transplant program. Its faculty grew to 1,200 professors, some of whom had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. By the time he retired in 1986, the school’s annual budget grew from less than $15 million to more than $180 million.

“Sherm not only led the building of the UCLA School of Medicine and its hospitals through their formative years,” said Phelps, chair of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA and co-inventor of the positron emission tomography scanner, an imaging system for detecting disease. “But he also established, supported and protected their cultures of scholarship and their devotion to improving the care of patients.”

Described as “a remarkable scholar” and the “wizard” of the medical school, Mellinkoff wore his accolades lightly.

Respected for his humor, his intellect and cultural acumen, he had an uncanny ability to cite the right quote — be it from the Talmud or Nolan Ryan — at the right moment, acquaintances recalled. But none was more apt than that of Albert Einstein, printed and mounted in his UCLA office:

“The only way to escape the personal corruption of praise is to go on working.”

Hard work — and the ability to dream — are what transformed the UCLA School of Medicine in Mellinkoff’s early years as dean.

“He was able to convince people to believe in him, and together believe that they could build a medical school,” said Phelps, who compared his colleague to UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. “Both Sherm and Wooden sought to create greatness in others, and from that they created greatness in themselves.”

Phelps recalled Mellinkoff’s curiosity about the PET scanner and their conversation about how it could help diagnose their patients. But it wasn’t so much the technology that the dean was interested in.

“Sherm was trying to gauge how deeply I believed in it in order to determine how deeply he would believe in it,” Phelps said.

Mellinkoff came to UCLA in 1953. The medical school had been established two years earlier, and lectures were held in the lounge of the university’s religious conference building. Researchers worked in Quonset huts near the former Bullock’s in Westwood. The hospital opened in 1955; the same year, the medical school awarded its first class of 28 students their diplomas.

Five years later Murphy was named chancellor, and the medical school was poised for prominence.

Born in Pennsylvania on March 23, 1920, Mellinkoff grew up in Los Angeles, where his parents moved soon after his birth. He attended Beverly Hills High School, where he declared that he was “interested in … everything except medicine,” until he took a biology class his senior year. A graduate of Stanford University in 1941, he enrolled in its medical school, where he met his wife, June O’Connell.

Named chief resident at Johns Hopkins University in 1951, Mellinkoff was asked to join the faculty at UCLA two years later. His vitae included two years with the Army, a residency at Johns Hopkins and a gastroenterology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.

“He had a very strong philosophy about what an administrator should do,” said Elizabeth Neufeld, former chair of the department of biological chemistry at UCLA. She met Mellinkoff in 1984. “He was never overbearing, but earned his authority because he knew so much.”

Fogelman recalled meeting Mellinkoff in 1964. At the time Fogelman, 24, was looking for some academic advice and spent an hour speaking with the new dean. “There was nothing on his mind other than helping me decide what to do,” Fogelman said.

Mellinkoff’s tenure as dean was unusual for lasting as long as it did, said Charles Young, who replaced Murphy as chancellor in 1969. “What made him so great as a dean was his humanity,” Young said.

Mellinkoff was known for his self-deprecating humor, once commenting that when brain transplants become practical, “deans’ brains will be in highest demand because they’ve never been used.”

By the time Mellinkoff retired, the UCLA School of Medicine had graduated 3,000 students and its enrollment had grown to 650. There were 1,500 interns, residents and fellows on the UCLA campus and at seven other hospitals.

After retirement and a sabbatical, he returned to UCLA to teach clinical medicine as the first recipient of a $1-million endowed chair established in his honor through private donations.

While Mellinkoff insisted that his faculty be “not only great teachers but also people who are going to be discovering new things,” he never lost sight of the basic goal of medicine: to take care of people, to prevent disease and to provide comfort.

“I love medicine,” he once told The Times, “and I think that students who love medicine will always find happiness and rich rewards in doing the best they can. After all, this is a very perilous and capricious and unsettled world, but a good doctor’s relationship with his or her patients, that relationship has survived a lot of vicissitudes.”

Mellinkoff is survived by two children, Albert and Sherri Mellinkoff.

thomas.curwen@latimes.com