Bernard Fisher, M.D., Honored By Friends of the National Library of Medicine

Bernard Fisher, M.D., Distinguished Service Professor of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, has received a Distinguished Medical Service Award from the Friends of the National Library of Medicine for his significant contributions to the treatment and understanding of breast cancer.

Dr. Fisher received the award at Celebrating Pioneers in Cures for Breast Cancer, an event and dinner at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., on May 8.

Dr. Fisher, a 1943 graduate of Pitt’s medical school, is a renowned cancer investigator whose laboratory studies during the 1960s led him to formulate a new hypothesis regarding the biology of breast cancer. During the next three decades, he demonstrated in clinical trials that breast-conserving surgery was as effective as radical mastectomy for treating the disease. Realizing that breast cancer is a systemic disease, in subsequent trials he established the effectiveness of treatment using chemotherapy and/or tamoxifen. In more recent studies, he was the first to prove that tamoxifen could prevent breast cancer in high-risk women—one of his most important contributions. Millions of women have benefited from his research.

Dr. Fisher’s many honors and awards include the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award, the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation’s Kettering Prize, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research, the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, the American Surgical Association Medallion for Scientific Achievement, the American Society of Clinical Oncology Distinguished Service Award and the American Association of Cancer Research Lifetime Achievement Award.