Harvey Akio ITANO

ITANO, Harvey Akio

The first Japanese-American to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, died Saturday, May 8, 2010, in La Jolla, Calif., of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 89.

Harvey was born in Sacramento, Calif., on November 3, 1920, the oldest of four children of Masao and Sumako Itano. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1942, but was unable to attend his own graduation ceremony, because he, as well as the rest of his family, were confined to internment camps established for the detention of Japanese and Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In recognition of having earned the highest academic record in his class, then-UC President Robert Gordon Sproul personally awarded him the University Medal during his internment.

He was released from the Tule Lake internment camp on July 4, 1942, to attend St. Louis University, where he earned his M.D. in 1945 before continuing his studies at California Institute of Technology, earning a PhD in Chemistry and Physics in 1950. In 1949 he married Rose Sakemi, who he had met when they were both students at UC Berkeley.

While working on his PhD thesis as a graduate student in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, Harvey found a way to distinguish the hemoglobin from the red blood cells of patients with sickle cell anemia from normal hemoglobin, by electrophoresis. His discovery, made in collaboration with Pauling, S. Jonathan Singer, and Ibert Wells, was the first demonstration of a molecular disease, that is, a disease caused by a single abnormal molecule.

He continued research on abnormal hemoglobins and related topics at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and, from 1970, at the Department of Pathology of UC San Diego, where he retired in 1988.

He was the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (1954), the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1972), the Japanese American of the Biennium Award of the Japanese American Citizens League (1980), the National Academy of Sciences (1979), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998).

A former Eagle Scout, he had a lifelong love of the outdoors, and he enjoyed fishing and golfing throughout his life.

He had an avid interest in his family history, which he could trace back to the late 1500s in Japan. In 1997 he and his siblings erected a stone monument on the Itano ancestral property detailing the history of the family in Japan and America.

He is survived by his wife Rose of La Jolla; his sons Wayne Masao Itano, Glenn Harvey Itano, and David George Itano; four grandchildren, Nicole Chaires Itano, Deanna Rose Itano, Michelle Sumako Itano, and Leilani Margaret Itano; his sister Edith Kazue Tanaka, and one brother, Masashi Itano. He was predeceased by one brother, Dean Tsuyoshi Itano.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on Sunday, June 20, at the Ida and Cecil Green Faculty Club at UC San Diego.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the San Diego Habitat for Humanity or the Japanese Friendship Garden of San Diego.