Highlights in this Issue

Remembering Freddy Hargreave RespiratoryMedicine lost a giant of airway disease research with the sudden death of Freddy Hargreave in June. Freddy devoted his career to the development of objective measures to assess airway disease. Notable achievements included developing a method to assess airway responsiveness, the first clear demonstration of a long term effect of allergen challenge on airway function and the development of induced sputum as a means to assess lower airway inflammation non-invasively. He trained a large number of current airway disease researchers. I count myself as being very fortunate to be one of their numbers. Paul O’Byrne and colleagues recount all that was special about Freddy (see page 1101). His approach was heavily influenced by clinical researchers at the Brompton and Hammersmith hospital in the late 1960s and was facilitated by a close and longstanding collaboration with his friend Jerry Dolovich at McMaster University. He focused on clinical issues of immediate importance to patients and his ideas came from taking a detailed history and careful analysis of the problems patients presented to him. This approach is seen by many as old fashioned and outdated in the modern era of molecules, genes, huge databases and even larger computers. Freddy never forgot that the clinician is in a privileged and unique position to identify and resolve important clinical problems.