Solomon Kaplan

Solomon Alexander Kaplan, MD, one of the original founding members of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, died on January 2, 2017, at the age of 92. Dr. Kaplan record as a clinician, teacher, researcher, mentor to trainees, and service to the field of pediatric endocrinology was accomplished over an amazing span of more than 60 years. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1924. He graduated from the University Of Witwatersrand School Of Medicine in 1945 and completed his internship at the Johannesburg General Hospital (1946–1947) and residency at the Transvaal Memorial Children’s Hospital (1947–1948). In 1949, Dr. Kaplan was awarded a Mead Johnson Fellowship under the auspices of the Society for Pediatric Research.

In 1953, he was appointed as Assistant Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Brooklyn. In 1954, he began 2 years of active duty in the U.S. Naval Reserve at the Naval Medical Research Institute Bethesda. Dr. Kaplan returned to SUNY in 1956 and was recruited to the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) in 1959 as Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. He held the positions of Chief of Endocrinology and Director of Laboratories at CHLA until he was recruited to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine in 1968 at the rank of Professor, where he was Chief of the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology for the next 21 years.

Dr. Kaplan began his research career in 1949, carrying out basic, translational, and clinical research addressing a multitude of questions. As a Research Fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati, early research focused on the physiology of fluid and electrolyte balance and renal function, culminating in one of the first reports of the clinical features and inheritance of nephrogenic diabetes insipidus (DI) in 1959. From 1971 until 1985, Dr. Kaplan was Director of the UCLA General Clinical Research Center.

Dr. Kaplan was an outstanding teacher; he was the recipient of the Robert Neerhout Housestaff Teaching Award in 1975 and the prestigious Sherman Mellinkoff Faculty Award of the UCLA School of Medicine in 1988. Dr. Kaplan trained 26 fellows over a 25- year span as Program Director and Division Chief. Dr. Kaplan’s legacy is embodied by the fact that seven of his former fellows have gone on to head divisions of pediatric endocrinology.