Among those who have sought to define the nature of medical knowledge and the ways in which biomedical information may be organized, analyzed, and used, few have displayed the scholarly and thoughtful approach demonstrated by Scott Blois. It was with sadness that friends and colleagues learned of his death in July 1988, finally victim to a disease which he had successfully fought for over a decade of productive professional life.
Scott's contributions will be well known to many readers of Computers und Biomedical Research, for his work has had a broad influence in the field of medical informatics. Culminating in his landmark book "Information and Medicine: The Nature of Medical Descriptions" (UC Press, 1984), his career spanned 40 years of contributions to a wide variety of disciplines: communications. physics. dermatology, medical decision making, and computer science. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1941 and, after serving as a communications specialist during the war, returned to school to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford in 1952. Much of his early work was on magnetic film computer memory, for which he received a U.S. Patent in 1955. A growing interest in the biological aspects of physics, and in the electron-spin resonance of melanins, led him to Stanford Medical School where he received an M.D. in 1959. Director of the Biophysical Laboratory at Stanford from 1961 to 1964, he continued his interest in melanin and melanoma. After a dermatology residency in the mid-1960s. he moved to UC San Francisco, where he became director of the melanoma clinic and continued in that role until his death.
Since 1972, Dr. Blois was Professor of Medical Information Sciences and Dermatology at UCSF. He founded the Section on Medical Information Sciences in that year and was its only chairman. The UCSF program has graduated a large number of specialists in medical informatics, several of whom have gone on to lead academic research programs at other institutions.
In the 1980s he and his students pursued two related research themes. each of which was derived from his scholarly analysis of medical information as described in his 1984 monograph. First, they developed the diagnostic prompting computer program known as RECONSIDER, a system that has been widely studied and admired. More recently, he led one aspect of the National Library of Medicine's multiyear research effort to develop a Unified Medical Language System.
Scott's contributions in both dermatology and medical informatics have been recognized with a large number of awards and leadership positions. He received the Gold Award of the American Academy of Dermatology for original research on a radioisotope technique for melanoma detection. Later he received the Silver