Hanover
Munck was known for his “intellectual honesty, collegiality and thoughtful mentoring,” Geisel School of Medicine Interim Dean Duane Compton told an in-house publication after Munck’s death.
The Argentine-born scientist shared with those he worked with “his humanity, his ability to explain things and the opportunity to see the joy of the science that he was carrying out through his eyes,” said Charles Wira, a Geisel professor and former student, longtime friend and colleague of Munck’s.
Munck was 90 when he died of natural causes on April 29 at the home he shared with his wife in Kendal at Hanover. He had been a member of the faculty of the medical school from 1959 until 2001, and continued to contribute there during retirement.
The span of Munck’s scientific life is shown by the range of instruments he used for calculations. He kept a pencil and paper at his bedside so that he could jot down designs for experiments that occurred to him during the night. He was an early user of the time-sharing computer system established at Dartmouth in 1964.
And on the day before his death, Munck visited Wira and told him about the new iPad he had ordered. “He was very computer savvy,” Wira said of his late friend.
Years ago, Wira recalled, Munck took a new Hewlett-Packard programmable calculator along on vacation, then “spent the entire two weeks at Nantucket on the beach programming it to postulate the cell cycle of glucocorticoid receptors.”
Glucocorticoid receptors. That was the tongue-tying, conversation-stopping appellation for what became the objects of Munck’s scientific passion, according to the “personal history” he wrote in 2015 for the academic journal Steroids. He described how his work on a doctoral thesis studying these hormones “powerfully aroused my interest in how these beautiful molecules exert the multitude of physiological effects that so dominate our lives.”
It was not an unrequited love: “I still recall the sense of wonder with which I walked home one night after a critical experiment, awed at having seen what I believed to be the first in vitro metabolic response ever with a steroid hormone.”
In other words, he had shown in a test tube where a hormone had triggered a reaction in cells in tissue taken from a laboratory animal. His later discovery that some English scientists’ achievement of the same result “preceded mine by a short period” didn’t diminish his sense of awe.
But his passion for life went beyond science, according to Wira, who recalled his days as a graduate student and young faculty member working with Munck. “If there was a day when … there was good powder snow up at the (Dartmouth) Skiway we would shut down the lab and go skiing, and then come back and start the experiments around four in the afternoon,” Wira said. “He knew how to take advantage of the beauty outside.”
Munck also demonstrated his physical prowess on rugby fields, squash courts, bicycle rides and even in the tops of the trees he climbed and trimmed to preserve the view from his house on Willey Hill Road in Norwich.
Munck’s bravery and skill extended into the intellectual realm. “He could do anything,” Wira said. “He had such a strong mathematical background and intellectual curiosity that he knew no bounds and was willing to tackle any project.”
“What a brain that guy had,” said Paul Guyre, a Munck protege, Geisel professor and a co-founder of Medarex, a successful biotechnology firm from which Dartmouth receives royalties. “He read in so many different areas: cardiology, immunology, renal physiology, all different areas of physiology, different parts of your body.”
That said, it was “the pure science and the math of” endocrinology, the branch of physiology that studies hormones, that drew Munck to it, said his younger daughter, Kirsten Munck, who is now a veterinarian in Oregon.
Yet for Munck taking on an intellectual challenge was more than a rigid exercise or venture into abstraction. Sometimes, he wrote in his 2005 narrative, “I simply followed my nose.” In another instance, he wrote, repeatedly immersing tested cells in chemical baths provided “a providential hint.”
Some challenges were more mundane. Laboratory research got slowed by the “clumsy glass pipettes” used by Munck and his colleagues, he wrote. Conversely, things moved faster thanks to the new “time-sharing computer system and BASIC, their newly created program language,” brought to the Dartmouth campus by a pair of mathematics professors including John Kemeny, who later became president of the college.
Getting important research published presented its own challenges. Munck recalled the frustration of dealing with a reviewer-editor who forced him to abbreviate a 1968 paper filled with data and mathematical formulae: “After I removed all connecting phrases and explanatory remarks it ended up like dehydrated soup, dense and barely digestible.”
Munck spiced his recollections of some eureka moments by describing the places where they occurred. One important realization came “while wandering along the Seine before my talk” at a symposium in Paris.
Munck’s crowning scientific achievement resulted from his pursuit of solutions to what he termed “two deep enigmas, rarely discussed or even recognized by endocrinologists.”
In laymen’s terms, Munck wondered how the steroids that he studied could perform what was generally viewed as their main function — protecting the body and its organs against stress — and yet also be used effectively in high dosages to treat asthma, arthritis, skin rashes and other inflammations.
To Munck and his fellow physiologists, those two characteristics seemed polar opposites. Protecting against stress meant stimulating activity in cells. Fighting against inflammation meant suppressing activity in cells. How could the same hormones both trigger and stop cell activity?
Those “two deep enigmas” remained in Munck’s mind in 1981, when he left Hanover on a sabbatical to work in a Swiss laboratory, and on into December of that year, as he returned to the Upper Valley for a visit.
“While sitting in the plane waiting for it to take off from Geneva I was mulling over these and other actions of glucocorticoids when suddenly all became clear,” he wrote later. Those steroids “protect by suppressing, not enhancing, stress-activated defense mechanisms, preventing them from overshooting and damaging the organism.”
Munck braced for blowback. It didn’t come. “Since my hypothesis upended old assumptions I anticipated strong reactions, but it was welcomed as a fresh, even revolutionary idea,” he wrote.
Munck’s insight gave him joy tempered by a sense of unfinished business. “That one simple, general idea could restore coherence to glucocorticoid physiology pleased me to no end,” he wrote. But, he added, “though the idea was simple, working out its implications and limitations was not.”
A decade after his epiphany, an article in Dartmouth Medicine, the medical school magazine, dubbed Munck the “grand theorist” of the physiology department. The theorist himself lived a life woven from disparate threads of nationality, language and culture.
Munck was born — on the Fourth of July, let it be noted — in Argentina, where he recalled joining his older brother on the pampas “riding on horseback every day, occasionally playing hide-and-seek in the cornfields.”
Munck’s parents were born in Denmark. They moved to Argentina, where his father was an agronomist who worked for British-owned railroads, developed new strains of wheat and later acquired, according to Wira, “a pretty good spread of land down there.”
Munck grew up speaking Spanish, English and Danish, and went to the University of Buenos Aires to study engineering, but left after a year to board a ship to sail to the United States. There, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering.
Degrees in hand, Munck returned to Argentina to do his required eight months of military service, then took what he wrote later was a “pleasant enough (but) quite uninspiring” job with an affiliate of the DuPont Chemical Co.
After concluding that he “did not want to spend the rest of my life as a chemical engineer,” Munck returned to MIT where he earned a doctorate in biophysics and, according to a scrapbook posted on the website of the MIT Rugby Football Club, made his mark as an athlete. Munck, “playing his first game of the year at fly-half, turned in a fine performance” in a match with Harvard and got off “a beautiful drop kick (that) just failed to clear the posts” against a side from Montreal’s McGill University, according to 1952 clippings pasted in the scrapbook.
After earning his doctorate, Munck moved his scientific work across the Charles River to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. There he met Claire Brosi, a nurse from Switzerland. The couple were married in 1957 and decided to stay in the United States.
Munck later characterized the decision not to return to Argentina “a wise one.”
Munck’s older daughter Ingrid, a nurse, described him as “always wary of Argentine politics and the economy” which was susceptible to inflation. “When he left Argentina he never seemed to look back,” she added.
But buried roots can come to the surface. Wira recalled that a few years ago he imported two horses from Argentina to his farm in Plainfield. A mare named Noche warmed to Munck when he talked to her in Spanish, Wira said.
The couple moved to the Upper Valley in 1959 when Munck became part of the faculty at Dartmouth’s medical school. He became an American citizen that fall.
Munck wrote in 2005 that he found at Dartmouth “a low-pressure research atmosphere that encouraged creativity.” He noted the supportive environment was enhanced by the National Institutes of Health, the taxpayer-funded federal science agency, which “at that time … generously funded untested applicants like me with risky projects.”
Of course, no place is perfect. Donald Bartlett, a retired Geisel professor who was one of Munck’s first students, recalled that his mentor, by then a faculty member, “was very annoyed that he couldn’t play rugby with the Dartmouth club team.”
Munck and his wife lived in Norwich for most of his working career. They built a house where, according to Wira, “the view of Ascutney and the sunsets were just fantastic.” They raised three children. Their oldest, a son named Alex, died in 1994.
To relax, Munck built furniture, played the cello, drew and painted.
In 2008, Munck and his wife moved to Kendal at Hanover. That same year, a story in the Valley News described how Munck’s running program had made him “a role model” for a man 20 years younger than him who was beginning an exercise regimen.
Last year, Allan and Claire Munck celebrated his 90th birthday with their children and grandchildren on a small boat cruise from Sitka to Juneau, Alaska.
Although retired, Allan Munck remained an active presence at Geisel. “He attended my lab meetings right up until about two weeks before he passed away,” Wira said. “And he would contribute very significantly.”
In November, Munck signed a petition written by Wira and Guyre that lauded Compton’s leadership at Geisel but saw in a restructuring plan being proposed to address financial deficits the “potential to decimate” Geisel’s clinical research, patient care, teaching and reputation.
In retirement, he found a new outlet for his scientific talents: as a volunteer on the ant exhibit at the Montshire Museum.
A decade earlier, Munck wrote this simple summation of the impact of his scientific work: “In the 40-odd years since I hitched my fortunes to glucocorticoids their receptors and physiology have amply repaid my dedication both professionally and in personal relationships.”
On Saturday, July 9, from 2:30 to 5 p.m., Munck’s family, friends and colleagues will gather at the Montshire Museum to celebrate his life and share memories.
Rick Jurgens can be reached at rjurgens@vnews.com or 603-727-3229.