Eugene Cronkite (1914-2001)
Eugene P. Cronkite, MD, was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1917. In college he studied geology and minerology before shifting to chemistry. Upon finding out the meager salary of someone with a chemistry degree, he decided to pursue medicine and was accepted to Stanford University's medical school.
After receiving his medical degree, Dr. Cronkite joined the Navy and served as a medical corps lieutenant in World War II and as a director of the Naval Medical Research Institute in Maryland. He later left the Navy and began to study the effects of nuclear fallout. Among his subsequent achievements, Dr. Cronkite identified links between radiation exposure and cancer, developed a new treatment for leukemia, and founded the International Society for Experimental Hematology. In 1971 he was elected president of ASH.