Dr. Stanley J. Korsmeyer (1951 – March 31, 2005) was an American oncologist. Through his studies of apoptosis, Korsmeyer helped develop the concepts of the role of programmed cell death in carcinogenesis. In 1989 Korsmeyer was among the first to confirm that a particular form of lymphoma arose in certain B cells because they had a genetic flaw that caused them to overexpress a gene, Bcl-2, that was involved in the body's normal process for getting rid of them. He then conducted a number of studies defining the activity of a number of related genes and their role in apoptosis.
Korsmeyer obtained a medical doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago, completed a residency at the University of California Hospitals in California, and then trained at the National Cancer Institute under Thomas A. Waldmann and Philip Leder. He then became a tenured Professor, first at Washington University and then at Harvard at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, working within the Howard Hughes Medical Institute while at both universities. He was widely respected in the field and received numerous prestigious cancer research awards including the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research, and the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Charles S. Mott Prize. He was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society. The American Society for Clinical Investigation has established a scientific award in his name. In 2000 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.
He has been author on nearly 20 scientific papers published since his death from cancer in 2005--a publication rate that exceeds most living scientists.