D
r. Kamal G. Ishak died unexpectedly of a heart attack at his home on April 5, 2004. He had been in apparently good health and was working productively at the very end of his life. He was widely regarded as one of the foremost hepatic pathologists in the world. Although interested in all types of liver disease, he was especially known for his expertise in liver tumors, inherited metabolic diseases, viral hepatitis, and drug-induced liver injury.
Kamal was born in Atbara, Sudan, in 1928 to Syrian and Turkish parents. He spent most of his childhood and early adulthood in Cairo, Egypt. His father, recognizing with remarkable insight that English would be the dominant world language in the 20th century, sent his three children to primary and secondary school at the English Mission College in Cairo, where they received a first-rate British education. Kamal subsequently attended Cairo University, graduating M.B., Ch.B. in 1951, followed by a rotating internship and a residency in internal medicine. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit at Cairo, where he studied schistosomiasis and brucellosis and published his first 16 papers.
Dr. Ishak immigrated to the U.S. in 1957, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1965. He trained in pathology, first at Baptist Memorial Hospital in San Antonio, TX, and then at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, TX, where he also enrolled in graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in microbiology. He came to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington, DC, in 1963 as a staff pathologist and became chief of the Hepatic Pathology Branch in 1965 upon the retirement of the pioneer hepatopathologist, Hans Smetana.
In the 1960's the AFIP had earned the reputation as the place with definitive answers in pathology. The Institute, founded in 1863 as the Army Medical Museum, had collected specimens from around the world during the expansion of U.S. military engagements that began with the Spanish-American War. During World War II, it established a worldwide network of medical laboratories to diagnose the unusual diseases encountered by the troops. Epidemics of hepatitis during and after the war provided material for seminal publications on the pathology of acute, fulminant and chole-