I share the universal sorrow felt by all epidemiologists everywhere, although I am not shocked because he confided in me years ago that he was living on borrowed time, and on a kidney transplanted from his wife Judith. Tony had congenital renal disease.
Tony grew up and went to school and medical school in Adelaide, about 15 years after me. I first met him briefly when he was still a student, introduced to him by his mentor Basil Hetzel, who remarked that this was a young man who would go far. I got to know him well when he was a young epidemiologist, and our professional interests coalesced around the most urgent crisis of our time, the unsustainable pressure of human predation on ecosystems and environments everywhere on our fragile planet. Because of this shared interest and concern I tried to recruit him early in my tenure as department head of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Ottawa (he resisted the temptation).
It would be hard to find anyone with the same breadth of scholarship, the same degree of knowledge and understanding of the dangers facing life on earth, the same clear vision of contributions epidemiologists can make to finding solutions, to making the world a better, happier place for humans and other living creatures.
Tony was a warmly compassionate, charismatic man, an inspiring intellectual and moral leader. Like all who knew him, I will miss him very deeply and I mourn his loss.
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