Edward H. Lambert

Edward Lambert (1915 – July 27, 2003) was an American neurophysiologist, best known for his description of the Lambert–Eaton myasthenic syndrome and regarded as one of the founders of electromyography.

Early life and education Edward Howard Lambert was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota; his mother was Norwegian and his father was Finnish-Scottish from Montana. During the Depression the family moved to Chicago. He was always interested in biology as a youth. After two years at Morton Junior College he received BS, MS, MD and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois. After an internship at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, he obtained a PhD in physiology studying the effects of oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations on blood pressure and the vasomotor system.

Medical career In 1943, his PhD thesis caught the attention of the head of the Aero Medical Unit, a top secret research lab at the Mayo Clinic and he was invited to join the team. To be able to study its effects, they built the first human centrifugal machine in the country. The research team doctors, risking their own personal safety and fitted with gradually improving g-suits, spun in the centrifuge. Lambert, described as a principal investigator was a human guinea pig in these studies, with repeated episodes of loss of consciousness. Earl Wood, director of the lab, noted that Lambert had the most time of any of the team in the machine. The pilots were at skeptical of the first Mayo Clinic g-suits and real world experiments were needed to convince them of their safety. Lambert was assigned as director of the experimental program to allay their doubts. Again, as a human guinea pig, he went up many times in a Douglas Dauntless dive bomber with an Army pilot, flying in spirals over Rochester, Minnesota, to determine if g-suits were effective. Without a suit he had 27 episodes of unconsciousness, with a total of 7.7 minutes of lack of perfusion, His research began in 1948, with the application of EMG to myasthenia gravis. With over 280 publications, his contributions spanned the field of peripheral neurology.

Personal life Edward married Louise ("Liz", née Rueckheim) on October 12, 1940; the couple had no children; Louise founded and acted in the Rochester Civic Theater before she died of lung cancer, age 55, in 1972. Lambert later married Vanda Lennon from 1975 until his death in 2003. They met when he flew to the Salk Institute in San Diego, California, to advise her on a research project. They married 14 months later, and in 1978 she relocated to the Mayo Clinic. They had 57 collaborative publications.