Dr. Murray Jarvik, the man whose research helped develop the nicotine patch, passed away last Thursday at the age of 84.
Jarvik was a professor emeritus of psychiatry and pharmacology at UCLA. He received his master’s degree at UCLA in the 1940s and then a doctorate in psychology from UC Berkeley in 1953. He went on to receive his medical degree from UC San Francisco.
Jarvik’s interest in medicine began during his childhood in the Bronx. At 12, he contracted rheumatic fever, which damaged his heart and caused lifelong murmurs and other heart problems. At 28, he was struck by polio. In 1982, a chest X-ray revealed that he had lung cancer, but 10 days after the surgery to remove the cancer, he attended his son’s wedding.
On May 8, he died of congestive heart failure, which was caused by damage to his aortic valve from the rheumatic fever in his childhood. His son Jerry Jarvik said his numerous illnesses only fueled his desire to do research.
“He was really interested in life itself, and I think it’s that passion for life that really kept him alive all these years,” Jarvik said.
In the 1980s, Murray Jarvik and his fellow researchers began looking into a disease called “green tobacco illness.” Tobacco field workers were experiencing the same side effects as smokers, which Jarvik and his colleagues thought could help them find a cure for cigarette addiction.
After efforts to receive funding for their experiments failed, Jarvik and the other researchers resorted to self-experimentation.
“We put the tobacco on our skin and waited to see what would happen. Our heart rates increased, adrenaline began pumping, all the things that happen to smokers,” Jarvik said in an interview with UCLA Magazine early in 2007.
The nicotine patch patent was granted in 1990, and two years later was being prescribed by doctors to ease the pain of quitting smoking. By 1996, the nicotine patch was available as an over-the-counter smoking cessation aid.
Richard Olmstead, an associate researcher at UCLA, said Jarvik’s invention has saved countless lives.
“The nicotine patch remains probably the most used method of quitting smoking, and so therefore he has probably helped the most people worldwide in terms of getting off cigarettes and some other types of tobacco use,” Olmstead said.
Jarvik’s early work was briefly interrupted during his fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. An intern named Lissy accidentally wandered into his laboratory while he was working on a Sunday afternoon. The two discovered that they both held doctorates in psychology as well as medicine. They discussed their mutual interests over dates in the hospital cafeteria.
Jarvik and Lissy, now a professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA, got married six months later. They were together for 53 years.
Lissy Jarvik said her husband’s lifelong goal was to understand the phenomenon of cigarette smoking.
“He always wondered, “˜What was it? Why did people smoke? Why was it so hard to give it up?'” she said.
When he was an assistant professor of psychopharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the 1950s, Murray Jarvik and his associates taught monkeys to smoke through a tube. A few days later, newspapers were reporting that “the monkeys were “˜smoking’ heavily.”
Colleagues said Jarvik and his fellow researchers were the ones to discover what made cigarettes addictive.
“He was a giant and a pioneer in the area of nicotine research. In 1970, he was one of the first to recognize and publish that smoking was an addiction to nicotine,” said Nina Schneider, the chief of nicotine dependence research unit at the Greater Los Angeles Veterans hospital and a research psychologist at UCLA in the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.
In 1972, Jarvik packed up his lab and his monkeys and came to UCLA to find a way to treat nicotine addiction. He spent the remainder of his career at the university.
“He was an exciting thinker and a remarkable man,” Schneider said.
The desire to heal runs in the family: Jarvik’s nephew, Dr. Robert Jarvik, developed the first artificial heart to be transplanted into a human being.
Jerry Jarvik said the rabbi at the memorial service quoted an old saying: “If you save a single person, you save a world.”
“My father has probably saved millions of people because of his work with nicotine addiction and the nicotine patch. He’s saved millions of worlds,” Jarvik said.
Along with his son Jerry, Murray Jarvik is survived by another son, Laurence, his wife Lissy and three grandchildren.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to one of the following organizations: Americans United for Separation of Church and State, B’Nai Brith, the American Lung Association, or the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to one of the following organizations: Americans United for Separation of Church and State, B’Nai Brith, the American Lung Association, or the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.