Gifts in Action

Erdös Prize, Endowment Fund Extend Legacy of Breakthrough Research

The advances in medicine that clinicians bring to the patient bedside would not be possible without the bench researchers whose diligent labors pave the way for these advances. Ervin Erdös, MD, professor emeritus in the UIC Department of Pharmacology, dedicated himself to this kind of scientific inquiry for more than half a century, to the benefit of the countless individuals who have received treatments made possible by his research.

Now two funds in the College of Medicine—one endowed by Erdös and his wife, Sara Rabito Erdös, MD, Res ’90, the other named in his honor—will encourage and enable other researchers to pursue scientific inquiries that may lead to further medical breakthroughs.

The Erdöses recently made a gift to the College of Medicine to fund the annual Ervin G. Erdös, MD, and Sara F. Rabito Erdös, MD, Prize for Excellence in Basic Sciences Award. The award will be given annually to a fourth-year medical student who has excelled in research. The department of pharmacology also has established the Ervin G. Erdös, MD, Pharmacology Endowment Fund. Once the fund’s $500,000 goal is achieved, it will support a professorship, named in Erdös’ honor, to continue his legacy in research and education.

“Professor Erdös is a giant in the field of pharmacology who deserves to be honored, and the department of pharmacology is honored in turn that he and Dr. Sarah Rabito Erdös have chosen to make it the beneficiary of their generous gift,” says Asrar B. Malik, PhD, distinguished professor and head of the department of pharmacology. “The endowed professorship will extend his legacy of scientific studies that lead to advances in medicine, and the Erdös prize will help the department in encouraging medical students interested in careers as physician-scientists.” A native of Hungary who survived six months in Sachsenhausen, a Nazi concentration camp for political prisoners, at the end of World War II, Erdös says the gift is a way for him and his wife to express their gratitude for the opportunities they found in the U.S. (Sara Rabito Erdös, a retired anesthesiologist, immigrated to the U.S. from Argentina and completed her anesthesiology residency at the University of Illinois Medical Center in 1990.) “Some of the students who will be eligible for this award also will be immigrants or first-generation Americans,” Erdös says. “Our hope is that this prize will provide some of them with the kind of helping hand we received when we came to the United States.”

After the war, Erdös completed his medical studies in Budapest and Munich. He began his career in basic medical research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Munich and continued on to the Mellon Institute (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Pittsburgh. After holding positions at the University of Oklahoma and Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas, Erdös came to UIC in 1985 as a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and director of the university’s peptide research laboratory.

Erdös’ research has resulted in greater understanding of agents that affect cardiovascular function, including the discovery of several enzymes that are important in regulating blood pressure. His research on the angiotensin I converting enzyme (ACE) yielded insights that helped to develop ACE inhibitors, which are used in tens of millions of patients for the treatment of high blood pressure and heart and kidney disease.

Modest about his accomplishment—“I got lucky,” he says—Erdös offers his experience as a lesson for future medical students about the importance of bench research. “Even if you work with test tubes, if your experiments are well done, sooner or later you might be fortunate enough to see your discoveries applied in vivo,” he says.

By encouraging students’ interest in basic research, he hopes to help them become better doctors—even if they don’t make the lifelong commitment to research that he has. “My hope is that by expanding their horizons, the ones who become clinicians will think more about the causes and the effects of certain biochemical changes and what follows the administration of medicines,” he says, “or that the award will encourage them to stay in basic research and, I hope, make important contributions to our knowledge that help in fighting some problems of diseases and make it possible to treat patients better.”