Alan Neil Schechter, a Bethesda scientist whose love of learning spilled from his lab into every corner of his family and community life, died on Oct. 15. He was 86.
Dr. Schechter spent more than six decades at the National Institutes of Health, but those who knew him best said the heart of his work was simple and very Jewish: learn widely, share generously and make it useful to other people. “He cared deeply about others — not just himself,” his daughter, Daniele Schechter Huerta, said. “He always wanted what was best for his children and grandchildren, especially when it came to education.”
He was born on June 28, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York, to Sidney and Mildred (Levy) Schechter and grew up in a close, extended Jewish family. He skipped two grades, graduated from Midwood High School at 16, and was the kind of boy who haunted the public library. In notes he later wrote about his early life, he said that reading about the great scientific advances of the day — Einstein, Jacques Cousteau, even the atom bomb — “excited his imagination” and opened the path to science. A New York state scholarship helped him attend Cornell University and then Columbia University’s medical school — opportunities he never took for granted.
A defining loss came when his mother died of breast cancer while he was in college. Huerta said her father’s “interest in science, combined with losing his mother so young, pushed him toward medicine and research so he could help people.” He was not driven by family expectations — his father worked in the clothing business — but by curiosity and a sense that knowledge ought to serve, she added.
At NIH he found the community he wanted. His son, Andrew Schechter, said his father saw science not just as experiments but as a gathering of people. “He would get lunch in the cafeteria and pretty soon there’d be a whole table talking about their work,” Andrew said. “He liked connecting people — researchers, clinicians, visitors from other countries — so they could help each other.” For his father, Andrew added, “a research campus functioned a little like a synagogue study hall — people from different places in conversation over ideas.”
Though he became internationally respected in his field, he tried not to let the science drift away from real patients. His children said he was proudest of his NIH work that helped lead to effective treatments for sickle cell disease — not because of the technical details, but because it showed how basic science and clinical care could be entwined. “He had a very strong belief that research should connect to actually helping patients,” his son said. “That was a touchstone for him.”
Judaism was woven through family life. Alan and his wife of 60 years, hematologist Dr. Geraldine P. “Gerry” Schechter, were longtime members of Bethesda Jewish Congregation, a Reform community. They took their children to religious school and to High Holiday services, hosted Passover Seders, and filled the house with Jewish books. In his last years he was taken with a new translation of Psalms by a rabbi who had married them decades earlier; he bought multiple copies, donated one to the congregation, and gave another to a granddaughter who was studying Jewishly. “Learning was probably the most Jewish thing about him,” Andrew Schechter said. “The house was overflowing with books.”
Overflowing was not an exaggeration. Andrew Schechter remembered once challenging his father at the dinner table to prove he really knew where all the books were. “He said, ‘Name a book and I’ll tell you which shelf it’s on,’ and he got them all right,” his son said, laughing.
Home life in Bethesda was lively and unusually egalitarian for the 1970s and 1980s. Both parents were physicians, both were publishing and both cared for the children. Huerta called their marriage “pretty extraordinary,” adding that her father was very involved in running the household at a time when that was far from automatic for men in academic medicine.
Outside the lab he loved to “go places and eat things,” as a button on the family refrigerator put it. Travel combined several of his joys — meeting people, tasting something new, talking about ideas. Summers belonged to Castine, Maine, where a friend first steered the young couple in the early 1970s. Even there he refused to draw a line between family and work. Huerta remembered him sitting at the dining table of their cabin with packets of scientific papers mailed from Bethesda, phoning the lab each morning before the day’s outing. “He didn’t see that as stressful,” she said. “He wanted to keep the science going, and he wanted to be with us. He made them coexist.”
Grandchildren were another source of joy — flying model airplanes, going to the park, listening to their latest interests. “You got bonus points when you brought grandkids to visit,” Andrew Schechter said. “He’d known me for 50 years — the grandkids were new and interesting.”
Those who worked with him, his daughter said, consistently described him as a generous mentor who opened doors and paired people who should know each other. He wanted young scientists, including many who came from overseas to NIH, to have the same kind of welcome and opportunity he had found. “I think he’d want to be remembered as a loving father and grandfather,” Huerta said, “and also as someone who furthered scientific knowledge and helped many others to do that, too.”
In the end, that is how his family is telling his story: a Brooklyn boy who raced through school, lost his mother early and decided to spend his life learning in order to give to the community. He found a partner who shared that mission, a Jewish community that matched his values, a summer town that refreshed him, and a workplace where he could keep asking, right up to the end, his favorite question: “What’s new?”
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer.
