UCSF ALS Center Founder Dies of ASL

The internationally renowned researcher Richard Olney, who established the University of California San Francisco’s Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Center in 1993, died on February 1 of ALS.

He was 64 years old. He had been looking for a cure for the disease for 18 years, and he had been battling with it himself for eight years.

ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that causes its victims to gradually lose control of their muscles, so much so that eventually, even speech and swallowing become difficult. Patients often die of respiratory failure or pneumonia. Some of its other well-known victims are NY Yankees baseball player Lou Gehrig, and British scientist Stephen Hawking.

Today, the UCSF ALS Center that Dr. Olney founded is helping 375 other victims of ALS – also known in America as Lou Gehrig’s disease – to pursue treatment for their condition.

Dr. Olney was, in fact, one of the center’s first human subjects in testing an anti-cancer drug that the center’s researchers were looking at as a possible means of slowing the disease’s progress. Dr. Olney was so committed to the research being done right, he didn’t even try to find out whether he was receiving the active drug or the placebo, to comply with the lifestyle guidelines of the experiment.

Only at the end did he find out that he was receiving the active drug.

Dr. Catherine Lomen-Hoerth, who took over the ALS center after Dr. Olney retired, said, “It was typical of Rick to put the value of the medical research before himself and not take the drugs outside the boundaries of the trial.

“He knew it was highly unlikely that a treatment would be found during his lifetime, but nothing was going to stop him from doing whatever he could to advance the research.”

Today, around 30,000 American have been diagnosed with ALS, and 10,000 more are being diagnosed each year. So far, only 10% of the cases have been determined to have genetic roots. The rest have undetermined causes.

Dr. Olney is survived by two children, one grandchild, and his wife Paula, to whom he had been married for 38 years.