David Marshall Borkenhagen died on March 6, 2024, in Wayne, NJ. He was 86 years old. He was born in Kenosha, WI, on January 15, 1938, baptized in his infancy and confirmed in the faith in his youth by the Reverend Kenneth D. Martin at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Kenosha.
David received his early education in the Kenosha public school system. In the summer of 1955, he was a candidate for the office of Attorney General at Wisconsin Boys State (Badger Boys State) and lost the election. In the academic year 1955-1956, he won the Scholar-Athlete award and was elected President of his Senior class at Kenosha High School (the old Bradford High School), where he ranked sixth (6th) in his high school class among 526 students.
Between 1956 and 1966, during his college and medical school years, David was a Rotary International Foundation Fellow, and a Fellow of the Columbia University School of International Affairs. Also, between 1956 and 1966, he undertook interim leaves of absence from Harvard and Columbia for travel abroad, was the recipient of a United States Public Health Service grant, and during the academic year 1963-1964 made (by air) a circumnavigation of the Earth. In 1961, as a member of the Class of 1960, David graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. magna cum laude, and in 1966 he graduated from the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University with an M.D. degree.
After graduation from the Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeon, from 1966 to 1969 David was a medical intern and a medical resident at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver. In 1969 he was appointed a Clinical Fellow in Cardiology at the (old) Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, MA, under the (then) Chief of the Cardiology division Dr. Richard Gorlin. After 1971, he was a Special (Research) Fellow of the National Institutes of Health at the Shields Warren Cine-Angiography Laboratory of the Harvard Medical School under Dr. Herbert L. Abrams, where his mentor in experimental science and statistics was Dr. Norman K. Hollenberg. At the Shields Warren Lab, in a series of experiments in a canine model of acute mitral valve insufficiency, he described the Abrams-Gorlin effect, whereby clinicians are enabled to predict that in the clinical setting of acute mitral valve insufficiency (e.g., acute rupture of chordae tendineae and/or flail mitral leaflet) approximately one-half of any increase or decrease of the volume of mitral regurgitation flows retrograde through the (insufficient) mitral valve into the left atrium. From 1971 to 1976, David was an Instructor in Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and also was a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) under Nobel Laureate Dr. Bernard Lown. In 1970, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he attended one of the first organizational meetings of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), chaired by Nobel Laureate Dr. Henry Kendall. In the 1970’s, he was certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine, and by the American Board of Cardiovascular Disease.
From the summer of 1984 forward, David turned his attention to “politics”, and also to theoretical research on a problem in the field of astronomy and astrophysics. His “politics” were liberal. For example, he advocated a standard exemption from federal individual income taxation of $50,000 per capita per annum. With reference to the European Union, he thought that the Treaty of Maastricht of 1992 exemplified malfeasance in high political office, whereby the governments of the Eurozone bloc of nations consigned control over their national currency, and the currency-in-circulation in their national economies, to an independent European Central Bank.
David’s solution to the aforementioned problem in astronomy and astrophysics evolved into “The New Cosmology”, whereby he effectively refuted the so-called “standard” theory of 20th century astronomy and astrophysics; that is, the “big bang, expanding universe” concept, which some considered to be a flawed theory which had cofounded the disciplines of astronomy and astrophysics dating back to the 1920’s. After the turn of the year from 2019 to 2020, as his own health was failing, and having completed his research on “The New Cosmology” (a scientific tract he thought of as his magnum opus of his life’s work), David submitted a final draft to the Harvard Institute for Astrophysics for their review and a final disposition, which he himself in 1984 had predicted would result in a new ‘paradigm” in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics, pursuant to the concept of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962). We shall have to wait and see whether David’s judgement was correct.
In the last years of his life, he wrote “An Autobiographical Sketch” by David Marshall Borkenhagen (some 71-pages in length) and submitted it to his Harvard College Class Secretary to be posted on the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1960 website, https:///h1960.classes.harvard.edu).
With reference briefly to his health during the last years of his life, on the 7th of May of 2012 he had a severe myocardial infarction (a “heart attack”) complicated by congestive heart failure, cardiac arrhythmias, and angina pectoris, maladies that severely disabled him. With his death thereafter clearly in his sight, he elected to be cremated after his death, and arranged that his “ashes” were to be scattered into the waters of the Great Lakes from off the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in his home state of Wisconsin.
Modified slightly from the online version posted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 8, 2024.
