Class of 1970 Commemorative Biographical Book

A L A N P E S T R O N K

Continued

Now, I’m a St. Louis Cardinals season ticket holder. My hobby is genealogy. I’ve assembled family trees for me and my two wives that include more than 14,000 people. My surname was originally Pistrong, which means “trout” in Polish. A favorite food in our house is Lisa’s chicken soup (secret ingredient = chicken feet). On the rare occasions that I cook, I like to make Baltimore-style backfin crab cakes, or fettuccine with white clam sauce. They are consumed along with a good red wine from our cellar. Life is very good. Professional life: Six weeks into medical school I read the first of a series of articles written by Sir John Eccles in the journal Experimental Brain Research that detailed the neural circuitry of the cerebellum. I became so interested that I went to Welch library on the afternoons that the next journals were due to arrive in the mail to look for subsequent articles in the series. That’s when I knew neurology was my place in the medical world. I remained in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins for most of 23 years. I moved to Washington University in St. Louis in 1989 for a “perfect job” as director of the neuromuscular group in Neurology. I created the Neuromuscular Disease Center website (neuromuscular.wustl.edu) in 1993. The web site provides detailed descriptions, updated daily, of clinical and laboratory features, treatments and pathology of thousands of neuromuscular disorders. It is free to physicians, researchers and patients and is accessed each day by an average of 2,000 users from 102 countries. I am an author on 258 peer-reviewed papers that include: descriptions of 18 new genetic, immune or toxic neuromuscular disease syndromes; discovery of tests used worldwide for diagnosing immune-mediated diseases of nerves and muscles; and muscle pathology studies that provide new methods of diagnosing, classifying, and studying immune myopathies and their underlying mechanisms. The neuromuscular program that I direct has grown to 13 faculty, one of the largest in the world. We have trained over 100 fellows who are now department chairs, division heads, academic faculty and clinicians. It is still fun to go to work each day.

56