John Ward

Honorary Member 2006

John Fawcett Ward was born (1935) in Blyth, Northumberland. He obtained his B.Sc. from King’s College, University of Durham in 1956. There followed his Ph.D. (Action of Radiation Produced Radicals on Nucleic Acids and Related Compounds) in 1959 with George Scholes and Joseph J. Weiss from the same institution. He remained at Newcastle working with visiting scientist Shigefumi Okada until 1962 when he moved to UCLA to take up a postdoctoral position with Larry Myers. Within a year he was given a more permanent position. He moved again in 1978 to UCSD as Professor of Radiology where he remained until his retirement in 2001.
He has been fortunate in his many collaborations with e.g., Hazel Lewis, Ivar Johansen, John Byfield, John Zimbrick, Jürgen Hüttermann, John Murnane, Les Redpath, Tony Leadon, Bill Blakely, Jamie (Spike) Milligan, Don Jones, Charlie Limoli, David Brenner, Bob Fahey, Bill Dewey and Gerhard Kminek. 
His research focused on molecular mechanisms of biologically important radiation damage. He developed the concept of locally multiply damaged sites (sometimes called clustered damage) and the difficulties of repair of such.  He showed that these LMDS distinguished radiation damage from oxidative damage.  Mechanisms of action of radiosensitizers (halouracils) and radioprotectors (thiols) were other areas of study. In toto this work resulted in ~150 publications.
Funding for the research was mainly from the NIH, with occasional support from the capricious DOE. 
His career has been mainly in the U.S. thus his ‘home’ society has been Radiation Research. He has had a variety of appointments in that Society; Councilor for Chemistry, Editor, President and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Radiation Research. In 1991 he was Vice- President of the IXth International Congress of Radiation Research. 
His awards include the Weiss Medal from the Association for Radiation Research, 1995 and the Failla Award from the Radiation Research Society, 1997.

He has reviewed manuscripts and grants for many journals and agencies; he served two stints on the NIH Radiation Study Section, the latter time as Chairman.

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