A Shared Life of Advancing Science
From their honeymoon through retirement, Herbert J. Kayden and Gabrielle H. Reem reflect on their commitment to advancing science in New York and across the globe.
Published September 1, 2007
By Adrienne Burke
Academy Contributor
Herbert Kayden is known for his research on the genetic disorders of lipid metabolism. In the 1960s he published the first definitive studies on the metabolic pathways of vitamin E and its role in humans. His wife of five decades, Gabrielle Reem, made her mark on science with studies of purine biosynthesis and the mode of action of immunosuppressive drugs.
If you’ve attended a meeting at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) in the past year, you’re already familiar with them: The Herbert and Gabrielle Reem Kayden Auditorium was named to honor the couple’s generous ongoing support of the Academy. And if you’re a longtime Academy member, you’ve likely rubbed elbows with one or both of them. Kayden joined the Academy in 1949, presided over the board for one year, and continued to serve on it for another five. Reem, who jokes that she was an “Academy widow” for that period, has been an Academy fellow for more than 20 years.
The Backstory
Born in Manhattan and educated at George Washington High School, Kayden enrolled at Columbia College with plans to pursue a career in medicine. On the advice of the school’s dean, the mathematician Herbert Hawkes, who believed that no student of science should graduate without a good dose of liberal arts, Kayden balanced his pre-med schooling with humanities studies. “I took only the science that was required to get into medical school,” he says. His course load included literature with the distinguished professor Lionel Trilling and cultural history with the Columbia cynosure Jacques Barzun.
After graduating from NYU Medical School, Kayden served overseas as a Navy ship’s doctor until 1946 before beginning a career in cardiology research at Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island. At the time, the elite research hospital treated the city’s chronically ill, hosted clinical wards for NYU and Columbia, and was world renowned for anti-malaria research. “It’s hard to reconstruct the intensity of those sessions and the seminars and the grand rounds,” says Kayden, who was the hospital’s chief resident. “It was an extraordinary group of physicians—the most enthusiastic, bang-up, conscientious group I’ve ever seen.”
The group included Reem, who had landed there as a research fellow after medical studies in Jerusalem, Beirut, Geneva, Basel, and the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine. When Kayden later took a position at NYU Medical Center, Reem went on to become an associate at the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, where she worked in clinical medicine. Later, she was appointed professor of pharmacology at NYU, where she studied de novo purine biosynthesis, the mode of action of immunosuppressive drugs, and the regulation of human prolactin expression in lymphocytes.
Elected President of the Academy’s Board of Governors
When he became president of the Academy’s Board of Governors in 1977, Kayden appealed to Bill Golden, formerly President Truman’s science advisor (and now a Life Governor of the Academy), for advice on restructuring the organization. Kayden extended the Academy’s activities into New York City with programs to mentor high school students and host events with the New York Hall of Science.
He also hired NYU Provost Sidney Borowitz to be the Academy’s paid director. “We revised the constitution to cut the size of the board and imposed proper governance,” Kayden says. His influence so many years ago set the stage for the Academy to evolve into an organization that he now praises as one that enables scientists to share their wisdom, knowledge, and teaching with the world.
As Reem recalls her husband’s commitment to the Academy, Kayden remembers his wife’s focus on research being so intense that he once asked the campus police to check on her in her lab late at night. Asked what drove them, Kayden and Reem reveal a mutual enthusiasm for science so strong that they visited a research lab in Sweden during their honeymoon; this obsession has lasted throughout their union. Says Reem, “Science became our passion. Pursuing our research was very exciting, and whatever we touched was new.” These sentiments make it all the more fitting that their names now crown the Academy’s brand new auditorium, with its view of all of Manhattan.
