Thyroid researcher dies

Jacob Robbins, an NIH thyroid researcher and co-discoverer of the active form of thyroid hormone, died on May 12 in Bethesda, Md, of heart failure. He was 85 years old. In the 1950s Robbins and colleague Joseph Rall, both then at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, hypothesized that levels of the thyroid hormone, thyroxine, might fluctuate in the bloodstream and found that the hormone could not be bound to any other proteins in the blood in order to be active. "It was extremely important f