Steve Gray The Pioneer and Explorer.

     When I first met Steve at the University of Iowa, he was in residency. I noticed at

once that he was an unusual resident. Not only did he make his medical rounds, giving

loving care to his patients, but he would make a second set of daily rounds to various

research laboratories. He would appear again and again in certain laboraties, meeting

researchers, introducing himself, learning what was going on. He showed a compulsory

need to understand the underlying causes of the diseases he was treating. During his

residency, he wrote a thesis to obtain a Master of Science degree. Some would have

said that getting an M.S. after an M.D. is regression. For Steve it was progression

because he wasn’t interested in degrees and titles; he wanted the tools for discovery

and doing science well. He did it in the most expeditious way.

     In the early part of his career, he studied the human airway, particularly as it relates

to pediatric otolaryngology. (Prior to his death, he served as president of the American

Society of Pediatric Otolaryngology.) In the middle of his career, when he had to give

up his own surgery because of illness, he started to investigate cellular and molecular

approaches to wound healing, to finding cures for various voice disorders. His focus

became the voices of teachers, performers, public speakers, and of course children. In

these molecular and cellular approaches he was the unquestioned leader among his

colleagues.

     Towards the end of his career, his dream was to find the ten or twenty genes in the

human body that would explain how voices differ, and why some people get into vocal

problems and others don’t. Steve made great advances towards fulfilling that dream,

and I hope that those of us who continue in his legacy will help him complete it. Steve

loved the rush that came from knowing something that, at least in a moment’s time,

nobody else in the world knew--that discovery that came fresh out of his lab or

originated in his mind when he synthesized multiple observations.

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