Bernard Klionsky

Bernard Klionsky was born on October 8, 1925, in Binghamton, NY, the eldest son of Max and Marion Klionsky. He had two siblings, Eileen, born in 1928, and Seymour, born in 1934. He graduated from high school at the age of 16, and received admission to Harvard in 1942. During WWII, Klionsky trained as an electronic technician for the Navy and shipped out on August 1, 1945, arriving in Okinawa shortly after Japan’s surrender. After two years of service in the Navy, Klionsky returned to Harvard, and began applying to medical school. In 1950, Bernard Klionsky married Esther Walder, who went on to become a professor of English and Biblical Literature at the University of Pittsburgh and at Chatham College. Together, the couple had four children; Nina, Matthew, Ruth, and Daniel. Klionsky attended Syracuse Medical School, and Hahnemann Medical College, did an internship at Wisconsin General Hospital and a residency at the University of Kansas. In 1961, he moved to Pittsburgh to become director of Laboratories at Magee-Women's Hospital, a position he held for twenty-seven years, and later took a position at Presbyterian Hospital. Early in his career, Klionsky invented the open-top cryostat for collecting samples in the operating room, which has had a lasting impact on surgical pathology. Among his other professional accomplishments, Klionsky served as the president of the American Cancer Society, chaired the U.S. Public Health Service Committee on Reproducibility of Diagnosis, set up the pathology department at Beersheba Hospital in Israel from 1974-1975, and taught at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School for many years, where he collaborated with a Chemistry faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1970s to develop a program that allowed professors to put together lessons on the computer, and was active in the medical school admissions process, even after his retirement. In addition to his work in the field of pathology, Bernard Klionsky was active in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community. He was the original founder of Congregation Dor Hadash, and served as the president of Young People’s Synagogue.