EVERETT KOVLER was a Chicago area businessman, president of the Jim Beam Bourbon Company. Before his retirement in the mid-1970s, Mr. Kovler was involved in cancer-fighting efforts, serving as president of the Midwest advisory board of the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Foundation in 1960. He later spearheaded the establishment of the Marjorie B. Kovler Viral Oncology Laboratories at the University of Chicago.
MARJORIE B. KOVLER was a Chicago area businesswoman who created the Kovler Art Gallery, specializing in prints, an art form not widely appreciated or valued at that time.
Her philanthropic pursuits included being a very early advocate for civil rights for African American citizens. Such efforts led her to participate in the historic 1963 March on Washington, as well as numerous local protests. Mrs. Kovler was a recipient of the Thurgood Marshall Award from the NAACP.
Mrs. Kovler died from pancreas cancer in 1970, at the age of 49.
Held by Scott E. Kern
SCOTT E. KERN, MD, the inaugural Everett and Marjorie Kovler Professor of Pancreas Cancer Research, is professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also the co-director of the Gastrointestinal Oncology Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Dr. Kern has over 20,000 citations of his work among scientific publications, the majority concerning his pioneering studies of pancreatic cancer. His publications and citations place him among the top one percent of scientists in productivity and acclaim.
Dr. Kern’s laboratory is currently developing drug screening systems to identify promising therapies for the common adult-onset cancers based on our understanding of BRCA2 and other disrupted DNA-repair features in cancer cells. His discoveries are now the basis of a number of U.S. patents and novel and ongoing therapeutic trials for pancreatic cancer at Johns Hopkins and other centers.
Scott Kern graduated from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where he participated in an accelerated six-year program that combined undergraduate and medical studies. He did initial research training and his residency at Michigan and became board certified in anatomic and clinical pathology, and completed his fellowship in pathology and molecular genetics of gastrointestinal cancer at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins.