Nobel Prize winner hailed from Portglenone

92-year old Dr John Shepherd’s ground breaking discoveries in earned him the Nobel Prize and he became a world leader in the study of cadiovascular disease.

Dr Shepherd died on Tuesday, October 6, at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota in the United States, he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

His discoveries advanced the treatment of high blood pressure and he gave advice to astronauts on how to withstand the physical pressures of space travel.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Dr Shepherd was born in 1919 and became one of 15 physicians in the Portglenone family.

Dr Shepherd emigrated to America from Northern Ireland in 1957 and played a key role in the space race, chairing the NASA space sciences board that devised counter measures to weightlessness and also spear-headed scientific exchange with the Soviet Union at the peak of the cold war.

Upon hearing about Dr Shepherd’s death local Portglenone resident, Helen Irwin contacted the Times to talk about the physician’s connection to the village.

Ms. Irvine said that Dr John Shepherd would regularly return to Portglenone from America to visit his brother Dr Fred Shepherd who was a well-known doctor in the village for many years.

She said: “Dr Fred was the local physician and people in the village were very fond of him.

“He was my neighbour and on many occasions, Dr John Shepherd would come to visit his brother and my husband and I got to know them.

“He really was totally dedicated and was the most unassuming man. His father had been minister in Portglenone and then his brother became the area’s doctor, there’s no doubt that he was a Portglenone man at heart.”

Dr John Shepherd went to Portglenone Primary school then attended Campbell College in Belfast. After graduating from Queens University, he completed his internship and residency at Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital.

The physician then joined the academic staff at Queens before travelling to Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic on a one year Fulbright scholarship to engage in cardiovascular research, where ironically he would spend his final hours as a patient years later.

Dr Shepherd’s colleague Dr Michael Joyner said that the Northern Irishman was one of the top cardiovascular researchers of the last fifty years.

Dr Shepherd is also known for being president of the American Heart Association in 1975, and has worked closely with the National Academy of Sciences for years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in the 80’s for his foundational work.

Dr Shepherd is survived by his second wife, Marion, a son and daughter, four step-children, five grandchildren, eight step-grandchildren, and a great-grandson.