Samuel J. Fomon – Champion of Growth

lows and post-doctorates from all over the world and trained many doctoral students. Most left changed, some more, some less, but all left carrying an implant, a compass to sound infant nutrition. Not long after he arrived at Iowa, Dr. Fomon was asked to take over leadership of the metabolic unit that had been in existence since the 1920s. Thus began a five-decadelong journey through childhood nutrition. When he was finished, he had changed the field for good. He spent the first years at Iowa conducting metabolic balance studies with an eye on determining nutrient requirements of infants. Realizing that balance studies are poorly suited for the purpose, and appreciating that growth is the driving force behind the young child’s high nutritional needs, he began to devote a good portion of his energy to the study of growth and made seminal contributions in two areas. First came body composition. In a burst of creative energy he constructed from limited data a first draft of what would become the reference infant. Immediately the model was put to use for deriving the nutrient requireA career-long preoccupation with growth is what sets Samuel J. Fomon apart from most other nutrition scientists. Not to belittle his many other contributions, but the elucidation of childhood body composition and its changes and the introduction of growth as an indicator of nutritional adequacy stand out as his most distinct and arguably most important contributions. Had he done nothing else, his place in the pantheon of nutrition science would be secure. He did, of course, do much else. Samuel J. Fomon died on December 18, 2007, after a valiantly fought drawn-out battle with multiple myeloma. He was born on March 9, 1923, in Chicago. After the early death of his mother he spent his childhood with relatives in Wisconsin where he also attended high school. In 1944 he graduated cum laude from Harvard and in 1947 received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. After residency training in pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia he completed a fellowship in renal physiology at the Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati. He served as captain with the US Army for two years before joining the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Iowa in 1954. Although he became Professor Emeritus in 1993 he continued to be quite active in research for another decade. The many important positions he held included the Chairmanship of the Committee on Nutrition of the American Academy of Pediatrics (1960–63), Councilor, Editorial Board Member and eventually President (1981–82) of the American Society of Clinical Nutrition, and Editorial Board Member, Councilor and eventually President of the American Institute of Nutrition. Of the many honors bestowed on him, the Bristol-Meyers Squibb/Mead Johnson Award (1992) was probably the most prestigious. He attracted dozens of fel-