Clark M. Blatteis

Clark Martin Blatteis (June 25, 1932 – March 14, 2021), was a German-American biomedical researcher. After escaping Nazi Germany as a child, he became a distinguished professor in the field of physiology at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Memphis, Tennessee, where much of his work focused on discovering details of the mechanisms by which fevers develop.

Early life, education, and career Born in Berlin, Germany, Blatteis and his Jewish family were forced to flee their home to escape further Nazi persecution after his father's arrest in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht and as a condition for his release from Buchenwald concentration camp where he was a prisoner. They were among the 937 Jewish German refugees aboard the MS St. Louis who were denied entry into Cuba, the United States, Canada, and all the other Western Hemisphere countries, and consequently obliged to return to Europe. Blatteis later recalled that his introduction by Horvath to his later field of research was "trying to maintain my own body temperature as a test subject in the cold room". Immediately following his graduation, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned as a first lieutenant, Medical Service Corps, to the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he served until 1961. While there, he conducted experiments on dogs to determine the cause of shivering, reporting that it related to circulation of cooled blood rather than a nervous response. In 1966, Blatteis was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Physiology, University of Tennessee College of Medicine, as an associate professor, becoming a full professor in 1974. The following year he was named a Fulbright scholar for a program at the Cayetano Heredia University of Peru from June to September 1975.

Professorial career The bulk of his research over his years at the University of Tennessee concerned the elucidation of the physiologic mechanism that initiates fever and its associated reactions to infectious pathogens. He published a study on fever induction mechanisms in 1983 which outlined mechanisms by which cytokines produced following infection could cross the blood–brain barrier, and which "launched a new concept of immune to brain signaling". His work in the 1990s and 2000s continued to focus on various mechanisms by which the body develops fevers, particularly with respect to the lipid compound prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and nitric oxide. He was elected a fellow of the American Physiological Society in 2019. Blatteis conducted research at the University of Tennessee for forty-two years, retiring from active research on October 1, 2008. Yolanda died in 2018, and two-and-a-half years later Blatteis himself died in his sleep at his home at the age of 88.