Biography
Dr. Martin Lipkin has been a faculty member at the Cornell Medical Center throughout his entire academic career. His appointments there have included Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Member and Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Visiting Physician at The Rockefeller University Hospital and Director of Clinical Research at Strang Cancer Prevention Center. During his career his main activities involved developing and carrying out new research programs in several academic disciplines, from which he became a Nominator for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
When he began his academic career at the Cornell University Medical College he initiated a new academic field by demonstrating the first automated correlation and processing of medical information published in the journal Science, following which he introduced computers into clinical medicine and medical research. He then carried out a series of studies in a newly emerging area of human physiology and was the first to identify human cells synthesizing DNA, and the phases of the cell cycle and kinetics of cell renewal in humans. From these findings he developed a multi-step molecular model of carcinogenesis and a series of cellular biomarkers associated with the evolution of cancer. He also developed the first comprehensive high-risk registry of individuals with increased susceptibility to colon cancer together, and with it the first translational research project at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. This new ability to study cellular biomarkers in individuals with increased cancer susceptibility enabled investigators to study large numbers of new agents to inhibit human tumors, leading to a broad expansion of human clinical trials in the cancer chemoprevention field. He also published the first textbook on the subject of gastrointestinal cancer, and the first textbook on preventing tumors by nutritional and pharmaceutical chemopreventive agents.On the latter topic, he carried out the first study demonstrating that increasing dietary calcium and vitamin D had efficacy as potential chemopreventive agents to inhibit human benign and malignant colonic tumors, and published the first textbook on calcium, vitamin D and cancer prevention. In recent years his studies have focused on the chempreventive inhibition of tumors in preclinical wild type and genetically modified rodent models.
Dr. Lipkin is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, American Physiological Society, American Association for Cancer Research, American College of Physicians, American Gastroenterological Association and other organizations. He was a founding member of the National Cancer Institute's Organ Site Program and NCI's National Large Bowel Cancer Project where he became Director of its Executive Committee, and he was a founding member and director of the International Society of Investigative Gastroenterology, the Digestive Disease Foundation, chairman of the Scientific Program Committee and the Educational Committee of the Medical Society of the State of New York, and the Cancer Prevention Committee of the American Association for Cancer Research.
He has also been a member of the American Cancer Society's Council on Analysis and Projection, the American Medical Association's Committee on Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technology Assessment, the Internal Medicine Advisory Board of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals, and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board WellGen, Inc. Among awards he has received are the Medallion of the National Cancer Center of Japan, the Chao Distinguished Lectureship of the University of California, the Elise Strang L'Esperance Leadership Award and the Albert F.R. Andresen award of the Medical Society of the State of New York.
