Deceased Member    

John N. Brady, dedicated researcher, scientific pioneer, and visionary teacher, died on 27 April 2009 after a short but courageous battle with colon cancer. Qualities that come to mind when one remembers John are integrity, humility, dedication, consideration, fairness, loyalty, and always, a sense of humor.    

Brady received his bachelor's degree in microbiology in 1973 from Southern Illinois University and went on to obtain his master's degree at the same university, working on vaccines against three different viruses. In 1978, he was awarded his Ph.D. from Kansas State University, where he worked on structural proteins of polyomavirus under the direction of Richard Consigili.    

Brady began working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1978 with Norman Salzman. Several years later, he moved to the NCI to work alongside George Khoury. With the passing of George, Brady assumed the role of acting director of the laboratory and in 1993 became chief of the Virus Tumor Biology Section. He received an NCI Intramural Award for Innovative Research in 1998 and was named NIH Senior Biological Research Scientist in 2002 by the director of the NIH. This highly competitive appointment is reserved for researchers with outstanding achievements and is only one of 45 honors John received for excellence in research.    

In 2004, he became principal investigator of the Laboratory of Cellular Oncology.  Brady held adjunct appointments at George Washington and Georgetown Universities and contributed to a number of book chapters with Norman Salzman, Peter Howley, Yosef Aloni, P. Hollsberg, D. Hafler, K. Khalili, Irvin Chen, and Rafi Ahmed. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Virology and AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, as well as a number of other journals.  Brady chaired many meetings, including the Cold Spring Harbor RNA Tumor Virus Meeting and the HTLV-1 Retrovirus International Conference, and organized the meeting on posttranslation modification of p53 held at the National Cancer Institute. He published more than 202 papers in peer-reviewed, high-impact journals, including, but not limited to, Journal of Virology, Nature, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Molecular Cell.    

Brady was a central member of a talented group of young scientists in the  Khoury lab. He had a thoughtful and careful approach to doing highly competitive work on viruses and gene expression. Fundamental mechanisms by which enhancers and other transcriptional regulatory elements function were just beginning to be  understood. Brady did important work in this area, starting with SV40 and E2F and then moving into HTLV-1 research. Early in his NIH career, John showed that the SV40 large T antigen transactivated the SV40 major late promoter independently of its effect on DNA replication and that the ability to transactivate the SV40 major late promoter correlated with its ability to bind to SV40 DNA. This observation, along with John's prior characterization of the SV40 major late promoter in vitro and in vivo, made it possible to study how genes were transactivated using molecular approaches.    

More than 50 students, postdocs, and research fellows went through Brady's lab;  he had a broad perspective and inspired  others to think openly. He was always welcoming to those in his laboratory and created an environment where everyone was allowed to have an active role in contributing to the lab's work. His commitment to the expansion of the world's scientific knowledge was exemplified by his attention to ensuring that the appropriate controls were included in all experiments, that results were reproducible, and that adequate attention was paid to the relevance of the experimental conditions used.  In closing, John was well known for his persistence and determination, his infectious enthusiasm for every discovery, great or small, and his skill in encouraging his prote´ge´s. His many friends and colleagues greatly appreciated his good cheer, boundless energy, social grace, and generosity.  John's death will be a loss felt for many years to come. I believe if he was able to impart one last bit of wisdom, it would be to remind us to be diligent in looking after our health and well-being. He will be greatly missed.    

Lynn W. Enquist    
Editor in Chief, Journal of Virology (the above is a shortened version of an obituary published in the Journal of Virology 83:6975-6976.)