Clark M. Blatteis

Blatteis (born June 25, 1932) is a German-American researcher and professor in the field of pathophysiology , and a professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine . Born in Berlin , Germany , his Jewish family was forced to flee their home to escape the Nazi regime. They were among the 937 Jewish German refugees aboard the MS St. Louis who were denied entry to Cuba, the United States, and Canada, and turned back to Europe. There, the family was sent to Belgium, but had to flee again when that country was invaded, making their way to Casablanca , then to French Morocco . In 1948, they moved to the United States, where Blatteis received a bachelor's degree from Rutgers University in 1954, followed by a master's degree and a PhD in physiology in 1957 from the University of Iowa , under the supervision of Dr. Blatteis later recalled how one of his earliest experiences with Horvath was "regulating my own body temperature – as a subject in the cold room". From 1962 to 1963 he was a postdoctoral fellow under Dr. Dawes at the University of Oxford . In the 1960s, Blatties worked for a time for the United States Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine , in Natick, Massachusetts . In 1966, Blatties joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine , becoming a full professor in 1974. He provided a theory for the death of three Soviet cosmonauts in 1971, proposing that that prolonged weightlessness had diminished the circulatory function of the heart, which was then unable to readjust to the sudden return to gravity. Blatties is a Fellow of the American Physiological Society . Blatteis retired from active research on October 1, 2008.¹