Lown touched my life through the Right Care Alliance—a sister organization of the Lown Institute. For a slow-adopting, skeptical medical conservative, the annual Lown meeting was nirvana. Lown meetings were the opposite of cardiology meetings. Cardiology conferences celebrate the science, congratulate the scientists, and promote the latest technology. Lown meetings tackled what is wrong with medicine: overdiagnosis, overtreatment, fractured specialty-centric care, biased evidence, and the crisis in end-of-life care. An invite to speak at Lown transformed my life. I couldn't believe this many people thought exactly as I do. I met clinicians, editors-in-chief, and researchers who study the state of medical evidence. My modest foray into academic work traces back to the connections I made. I now realize this was by design. Lown knew that bringing like-minded people together was vital. If somebody takes the initiative, others will see it and follow. A movement grows, then change happens. More

Bernard Lown, MD, a renowned cardiologist who played a pivotal role in the development of the first reliable heart defibrillator, died Feb. 16. "Bernard Lown was one of the greatest physicians of the last, or any century, and I was privileged to call him my teacher, colleague and friend," said Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that advocates for civic leadership and accountability in healthcare founded by Dr. Lown in 1973. "He showed us what it meant to be a healer and a citizen of the world. His commitment to social justice and a radically better healthcare system illuminated his belief that medicine must exist beyond the clinic to be true to its highest calling." More

A leading Harvard physician who shared in the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize has died at his home in Newton. The prize was for activism against nuclear weapons. But Dr. Bernard Lown had a vast array of accomplishments. Dr. Vikas Saini is a clinical cardiologist and president of the Lown Institute of Brookline. He joined WBUR's All Things Considered to explain why he believes Lown was one of the greatest physicians of all time. More

In 2012, he helped found the Lown Institute. The Brookline organization describes its mission as “to catalyze a grass-roots movement for transforming health care systems and improving the health of communities.”

“Dr. Lown embodied a rare combination of technical skill, scientific acumen, and profound humanism,’' said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, in a statement. “His commanding yet deeply comforting presence allowed him to connect with his patients in a way that was truly dazzling to generations of young doctors in training at Harvard.’'