Dale Edward Hammerschmidt

75, died April 5, 2022 on the inpatient hospice service at M Health Fairview Southdale Hospital. He had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain cancer in September 2021 and entered a clinical trial to try to find better treatment for this devastating malignancy. A breakthrough case of Covid-19 in January interrupted his treatment, despite vaccination and a booster. Complications kept him from being able to start second-line therapy for the glioblastoma soon enough to slow its growth. He lost speech and movement and entered hospice. He passed into unconsciousness and died peacefully with his wife at his side.

Dr. Hammerschmidt received his M.D. from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1970. He completed his internal medicine residency and hematology fellowship at the University of Minnesota. He joined the faculty in the Hematology Oncology Division in 1979, where he specialized in hematologic disorders. His research, funded by the National Institutes of Health for decades, focused on complement activation, neutrophil biology, inflammation, and coagulation. He was centrally involved in the seminal work that led to the recognition of the importance of complement activation and granulocytes in tissue injury. His clinical expertise encompassed all of hematology from leukemia and lymphoma to inherited platelet, white cell, and red cell disorders, rare defects in the clotting and immune systems, and acquired abnormalities of bone marrow and immune system function. He was the go-to person for complicated patients with rare disorders that no one else could diagnose.

Dr. Hammerschmidt will be remembered as a caring physician, passionate scholar, and devoted teacher to many students, residents, fellows, and faculty at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He leaves behind an indelible impression, not because of his 60s-style ponytail and long beard, but because of the breadth of his knowledge, wit as a communicator, and intelligent passion as an advocate for medical ethics. He was the consummate educator, and anyone who had the privilege of attending his lectures on coagulation or Grand Rounds will recall the clarity of his teachings and his charming sense of humor. He was a long-time friend to many across the Medical School with a legacy of distinguished service to the medical profession.

In the early 1990s, he became increasingly active in the bioethics of human research. Because of his keen interest in the rhetoric of the consent interaction, Dr. Hammerschmidt also held an adjunct faculty appointment in the Department of Rhetoric. He first served on an institutional review board in 1976 and was heavily involved in regulatory affairs and research ethics at the University of Minnesota throughout his career. His interest in research ethics grew as he dealt first-hand with the problems related to consent among patients facing devastating diagnoses. He published extensively on issues related to informed consent, privacy and confidentiality protection, disparities in health care and health care research, inadequacies in the oversight of research involving human participants, and other ethical issues related to clinical trials. Dr. Hammerschmidt also served as Senior Editor and then as Editor in Chief of The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine for 15 years.

In his eight years of retirement, Dale and his wife Mary enjoyed raising and releasing monarch butterflies and creating a habitat for them and other wildlife in their urban garden, sharing their passion for bugs, birds, and blooms with the neighborhood children. He grew vegetables, including some very hot peppers. In the winter, they lined their sidewalk with ice luminaries, lit with candles that Dale recycled from used wax, and he and Mary contributed ice lanterns to winter luminary events.

Cycling was Dale's sport, transport, and chosen retirement volunteer activity. He rode in the Minnesota Ironman for many years, and he participated in citizen races on a road bike. He rode a recumbent bike or trike ten miles to the University in summer and as much of the winter as possible. He hadn't missed a day of cycling in over six years when surgery for the glioblastoma interrupted his riding streak for 8 days, only to stop it again forever in late January.

Dale was passionate about sharing the opportunity to cycle with people who could not, for one reason or another, ride a conventional two-wheeler. His cycling interests had led to connections with manufacturers of adaptive equipment in Europe and Australia, where social programs routinely include people with disabilities in sports activities. He began to watch for used equipment to match to disabled riders' needs. It was a small, private effort at first, helping those riders who could store, transport, and maintain the special bikes.

Dale was excited to volunteer with a new program in Minneapolis for adaptive cycling. Twin Cities Adaptive Cycling (TCAC) offers a range of equipment to enable almost everyone to ride without having to own their own bikes. It was Dale's primary volunteer activity for the past five years, with a partial pause in 2020 for the pandemic. Two days before his September hospitalization, he had taken a blind rider out for a ten-mile tandem ride. He was one of the few "captains" at TCAC who could ride 30 miles with a blind partner on a two-wheeled tandem. He also helped to find equipment, to maintain the bikes and trikes, and to tirelessly promote the program to anybody else who would volunteer or donate to it.

The glioblastoma robbed Dale of his eloquence and eventually of his brilliant analytical abilities, but it could not extinguish his passion for life and service. He wanted to beat this cancer, while making as much of a contribution as possible to the knowledge of how to treat it. He enrolled in a clinical trial comparing standard care with immunotherapy. He chose to share information about his care and the process of selecting treatments in hopes of informing future patients and their caregivers.

Dale is survived by Dr Mary Arneson, his wife of 46 years, their children, Erika and Karl, and his niece Julie, as well as many extended family members. He leaves a beloved rat terrier, Bungee B, who misses him terribly. He was predeceased by his parents, Harold (“Shadow”) and June Hammerschmidt and by his brother Allan.

Memorials are suggested to the Musella Foundation for Brain Tumor Research & Information, Inc, Twin Cities Adaptive Cycling, the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, or Caring Bridge.

A memorial event is planned for later in the month at Gill Brothers Southwest Minneapolis Funeral Home, with a private interment service.

GILLBROTHERS.comMINNEAPOLIS, MN 612-861-6088

Published on April 10, 2022