Dedication of the Nathan Cummings Basic Sciences Building

Dr. S. David Pomrinse (1916-2013) received his medical degree from Western Reserve University and then served an internship and residency in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Pomrinse joined the Public Health Service in Washington, DC in 1956 as Chief of Health of the Aged. He received his Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University in 1959. Dr. Pomrinse was hired by Director Dr. Martin R. Steinberg and named the Associate Director of the Mount Sinai Hospital in 1961. In 1969, he became the Director of the Hospital, a role he served in until 1975, when his title became Executive Vice President of the Mount Sinai Medical Center. Dr. Pomrinse also served as the Chairman and Edmond A. Guggenheim Professor of Administrative Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine from 1969-1977. Dr. Pomrinse left Mount Sinai in 1977 and became the President of the Greater New York Hospital Association. He died in 2013.

Hans Popper, M.D., Ph.D. (1903-1988) was a distinguished hepatologist and a central figure in the twentieth-century history of The Mount Sinai Medical Center.

He was born in Vienna in 1903, and during the 1920s and 1930s he rose quickly through the medical ranks of his native city, working as a research assistant to the pioneering pathologist Dr. Hans Eppinger. In March 1938, as a consequence of the Nazi annexation of Austria, he was dismissed from his post at the University of Vienna. He accepted a research fellowship in pathology at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, where he quickly distinguished himself. In 1943 he was appointed Director of Pathology at the hospital; later that year he became a United States citizen. He continued an active research program in addition to his administrative duties, helping to establish the Hektoen Institute for Medical Research, and in 1944 he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois with a dissertation on the use of fluorescence microscopy to study Vitamin A.

During the Second World War he served in the U.S. Army as a surgical pathologist, eventually rising to the rank of Major. In 1950 he helped convene the first conference of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, which he would serve as President in 1962, and in 1958 he became a founder of the International Association for the Study of the Liver, which he served as President the following year. In 1957, he was recruited to succeed Dr. Paul Klemperer as chief pathologist at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He would spend the rest of his career at Mount Sinai and would contribute greatly to the growth and development of the institution.

In 1967 he was elected President of the Medical Board. He was a major proponent of the creation of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which was chartered in 1963 and admitted its first cohort of students in 1968. In 1965 he was appointed the school's first Dean for Academic Affairs, and in 1968 he was invested as the first Irene Heinz Given and John Laporte Given Chairman and Professor of Pathology. Dr. Popper was intimately involved with all aspects of the School of Medicine, which he saw as a place to advance the teaching of medicine by training students who were simultaneously well-rounded and specialized. During this period he published extensively on his vision of the modern medical curriculum and its implementation at Mount Sinai, including an important article outlining what came to be known as the Mount Sinai Concept of medical education. With the unexpected death of Dr. George James on March 19, 1972, Dr. Popper became interim President of The Mount Sinai Medical Center and Acting Dean of the School of Medicine, serving for a year prior to the recruitment of Dr. Thomas Chalmers as a permanent successor to Dean James.

In 1973 Dr. Popper retired from teaching and administration. He spent that year in Bethesda, Maryland as a Fogarty Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, which gave him an opportunity to reinvigorate his love of research. For the remaining fifteen years of his life he devoted himself to liver research, spending 70-hour weeks in the lab and becoming, in his own words, "a general practitioner of the human liver." During this period he kept up an extensive schedule of travel and correspondence, presenting at nearly every major hepatological conference and corresponding with his colleagues at other institutions, who would often send him slide samples and case reports for his comments. In 1977 he was invested as Mount Sinai's first Gustave Levy Distinguished Service Professor. Over the course of his career, Dr. Popper published over 800 scientific papers and wrote 28 books. He passed away in 1988.

Gustave L. Levy was Chairman and then President of the Mount Sinai institutions from 1962-1976. Gustave Lehmann Levy became a trustee of The Mount Sinai Hospital in 1960. At his death on November 3, 1976, he was Chairman of the Boards of the Mount Sinai Medical Center, The Mount Sinai Hospital, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Gustave Levy was born in New Orleans on May 23, 1910. He was educated at Tulane University and took his first job on Wall Street in 1928. He spent the rest of his life working in the financial district of New York. He became a partner at Goldman, Sachs and Company in 1946 and was still with that firm at his death. In 1934 he married Janet Wolf. They had two children: Peter A. and Betty Levy Hess. Mr. Levy was very involved in philanthropic activities. The list of organizations he worked with, or was an officer of, is tremendous. Of note here is his work with the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, beginning in 1954, and the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York, Inc., from 1968. During his years at Mount Sinai Mr. Levy oversaw the most intense period of change in the institution's history. When he became a trustee in 1960, the planning for the medical school was in its initial stages. The ensuing years, with Levy as President and then Chairman, saw the establishment of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the achievement of a university affiliation, the $154 million fundraising effort for the medical school building and endowment, the planning and erection of the Annenberg Building (in recognition of Mr. Levy's contributions the library was named after him and his wife), the purchase and renovation of the Cummings Basic Science Building, the recruitment of faculty including the first Dean of the medical school, and the graduation of the first classes of medical students. On October 26, 1976 Gustave Levy suffered a stroke while attending a meeting of the Commissioners of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He died at Mount Sinai Hospital on November 3. He was 66 years old.