Kilmer McCully, Pathologist Scorned for New Theory of Heart Disease, Dies at 91

It turns out that in the 1960s and 1970s, Kilmer S. McCurry, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School, had expelled him into the basement and claimed that the amino acid homocysteine ​​had been overlooked as a potential risk factor for heart disease.

His daughter, Martha McCurry, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. His death was not widely reported at the time.

Dr. McCurry’s theory, still debated, was that inadequate intake of certain vitamins could cause high levels of homocysteine ​​in the blood, causing plaque to stiffen the arteries. This idea challenged a cholesterol-centric paradigm supported by the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. McCurry didn’t think cholesterol should be ignored, but he thought it was cheating to ignore the importance of homocysteine. His boss at Harvard University disagreed. First, they moved his lab under the ground. They then told him to leave. He had a hard time finding a job for years.

“It was very traumatic,” he told New York Times medical reporter Gina Korata in 1995. “People don’t believe you. They think you’re crazy.”

Dr. McCurry subtly hunted himself as a Louis Pasteur-like microbial hunt at a medical conference in Boston in the late 1960s. There he learned Homocystinuriaa genetic disorder in which large amounts of homocysteine ​​are found in the urine of children with several developmental disorders.