Dr. John Q. Trojanowski died in a Philadelphia hospital on February 8. He died at the age of 75.
Virginia M.-Y. Lee said that the cause of his death was related to chronic spine injuries.
"He was a giant in the field and he meant that in two ways," said Shaw, a professor in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
He was 6 feet 4 inches tall. Shaw said that he was a towering figure in his field because he combined pathology and biochemistry to figure out what goes wrong when people get diseases such as Alzheimer.
The creation of a brain bank was a key to the work done by Dr. Trojanowski and Dr. Lee. They were able to compare the brains of people with and without the conditions and ask what the brain regions were like.
Their first quest was to solve the mystery of strange areas in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. At the turn of the 20th century, Alois Alzheimer described tangles as twisted strands of spaghetti in dying nerve cells. In 1991, Dr. Lee and Dr. Trojanowski discovered that the regions are made up of a missing piece of the nervous system.
At a time when most Alzheimer's researchers and drug companies were focused on a different molecule, Dr. Lee and Dr. Trojanowski insisted that it was equally important. They discovered that it was involved in a group of dementias called frontotemporal lobar degeneration.
The team discovered that alpha-synuclein accumulates in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease.
Their most striking discovery was that the abnormal folding of aprotein known as TDP-43 can cause what is now recognized as a common type of dementia, which is associated with profound amnesia and is often present along with Alzheimer's disease.
From 1997 to 2007, Dr. Lee and Dr. Trojanowski were among the top 10 most cited neuroscientists.
The scientific light that the rest of us followed was said by Dr. Jeffrey Kordower of Rush University Medical Center.
The second child of Margaret and Maurice Trojanowski was born on December 17, 1946, in Connecticut. He spent his childhood and adolescence in the United States and Germany because his father was an officer in the Air Force.
He graduated from Notre Dame High School in 1965, after attending many schools. He majored in German studies at King's College. He received a combined M.D.-Ph.D. degree in 1976.
Dr. Lee was studying at Harvard Medical School when he met Dr. Trojanowski at Boston Children's Hospital. They were married in 1979 and became faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Lee said it was exciting working with John.
She said that science was always on their minds and that Dr. Trojanowski had few activities outside of his work.
She said that he never had close friends other than her. She said that it was because he moved so often when he was young. The two of them were very close.
She said that they were very happy together.
Dr. Lee said that the end of Dr. Trojanowski's life was difficult. He woke up in the middle of the night and began to wander. He asked to go to the hospital after a fall the day before his birthday, where a Scan showed deep injuries to his spine.
He had to have two surgeries to remove the clot and was left paralyzed. He got infections and would get infections again.
Dr. Lee and Dr. Trojanowski talked about his future.
She said that you can stay here forever if you go into hospice care.
He wanted to end his life support. He wanted his ventilator tube removed.
Dr. Lee said he died two and a half hours later.
John, Davis, Mark, Lynn, Annie, and Janet Meyer are his siblings.
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