Bernard Landau; biochemist helped explain diabetes; at 80
NEW YORK -- Bernard R. Landau, a biochemist and physician whose innovative studies of how the liver processes glucose helped shed light on what goes wrong in diabetes, died March 24 in Cleveland. He was 80 and lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
The cause was a blood-borne infection, his family said.
From 1959 until his death, Dr. Landau held appointments in medicine, biochemistry, pharmacology, and nutrition at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he researched how the body breaks down and harnesses such carbohydrates as glucose.
Beginning in the late '50s, Dr. Landau and others investigated how tissues process glucose, especially in the liver, where it is stored as glycogen. He developed methods to follow and measure this metabolism by using radioactive tracers that were infused into bodily tissue. In some types of diabetes, the processing of glycogen is disrupted, leading to further complications.
Dr. Robert A. Rizza, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a former president of the American Diabetes Association, said Dr. Landau's work helped illustrate "how we are able to store glucose and what happens when the process goes wrong."
Dr. Landau later used isotopes to trace the production of glucose in the liver and to trace the body's generation of other simple sugars. With other scientists, he used isotopes to examine the biochemical pathway by which glucose is broken down.
In other work, he examined the effects and levels of ascorbic acid in the bloodstream of surgical patients.
Bernard Robert Landau was born in Newark. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before receiving his doctorate in organic chemistry from Harvard in 1950. He later received a medical degree, also from Harvard.
Dr. Landau was named an assistant professor of medicine at Case Western in 1959. He became a professor of medicine and pharmacology there in 1969 and was appointed a professor of biochemistry in 1979.
From 1967 to 1969, he was director of the biochemistry department in the
He was a former Nobel fellow at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Dr. Landau's wife, Lucille, a librarian and medical-information researcher, died in 2004. He leaves two sons, Steven of Wellesley Hills, Mass., and Rodger of Los Angeles, and five grandchildren.
