GEOFFREY DEAN: GEOFFREY DEAN, the former director of the Medico-Social Research Board (MSRB), was still contributing to international medical literature at the age of 90 despite suffering from serious medical problems during his last 10 years.
His last publication on the genetics of multiple sclerosis appeared last year in the leading American journal, Neurology. He recently finished a chapter on porphyria and epilepsy which will soon be published in a volume dealing with epilepsy.
Geoffrey Dean was born near Liverpool in 1918. He was educated at Ampleforth College and Liverpool University where he graduated as a doctor in 1943. As a newly-qualified doctor he dealt with many of the casualties of the Luftwaffe bombing of the English midlands and served a two-year attachment as medical officer to Bomber Command which he joined in 1943. In 1947 he left for South Africa where he set up practice as a physician and neurologist in Port Elizabeth. Soon after his arrival he identified a patient who had died from porphyria, a rarely diagnosed, serious and often fatal genetic condition lying dormant in patients until it is activated by certain drugs which were then being developed.
His book on porphyria, which includes an account of his international studies on the subject, is widely known to epidemiologists and physicians. He was eventually, painstakingly, able to identify the entire family tree of those carrying the porphyria gene, going back to the actual affected person and his wife who arrived in South Africa in 1685 during the early Dutch settlement. Dean was soon to widen his interest in medical epidemiology as he became involved internationally in researching many other afflictions of mankind, including multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease, histoplasmosis, lung cancer and other less common neurological diseases.
He was one of the few doctors who, during the apartheid years, criticised the South African government about the maltreatment of prisoners. He narrowly missed imprisonment under the regime for his courage and integrity and was only saved by the intervention of the Royal College of Physicians in London and its president.
Dean left South Africa and clinical practice to take up the directorship of the MSRB in Ireland in 1968. The board was established by the then minister for health, Erskine Childers. He remained in Ireland for the rest of his life and continued his international studies with the same intensity after his retirement in 1986.
His 18 years in the MSRB included inquiries in many important health and social fields, including the growing drug culture, the alleged Sellafield role in causing Down syndrome (which his investigations refuted), the problems of death certification in Ireland, and the alcohol culture and alcohols influence in causing colorectal cancer among other problems.
Other areas of research included agricultural workers health, contraception, HIV, coronary disease, stroke, psychiatric services, mental retardation and suicide. This valuable service provided by Dean and his board was achieved on a shoestring budget. He always regretted Barry Desmond’s decision to have the MSRB subsumed by the newly-established Health Research Board, fearing, rightly, that prevention and epidemiology would have a poor constituency within the clinically dominated ethos of the new body.
Geoffrey Dean was one of those rare practising doctors who combined clinical practice with an involvement in the study of the chronic medical diseases through research into populations. He was highly thought of by his peers in medical epidemiology.
He combined the gift of irrepressible curiosity with serendipity and a restless energy. His autobiography published in 1988 testifies to his seminal contributions to epidemiological research.
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth; University College Dublin conferred him with a doctorate of science; and the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland conferred him with its fellowship.
Despite his remarkable achievements in the field of medical epidemiology, and because of his fully occupied devotion to his researches, he was not so well-known to many of his clinical colleagues in this country which he served so well.
He is survived by five children, three by his first wife, and two by his second wife, Maria, who survives him.
Geoffrey Dean, born December 5th, 1918; died September 6th, 2009.