George King, MD
Honoring a Legacy of Giving
Family’s support of leading-edge lab advances research on diabetes and its complications
In a career spanning more than 40 years, George L. King, MD, Senior Investigator and Chief Scientific Officer of Joslin Diabetes Center and Thomas J. Beatson, Jr. Professor of Medicine in the Field of Diabetes at Harvard Medical School, has been conducting wide-ranging research on diabetes and its complications, which include vision loss, kidney failure, heart disease, and cognitive decline, among others. These conditions have a significant impact on both patients and their families.
A pioneer in his field, King leads the Dianne Nunnally Hoppes Laboratory for Diabetes Complications at Joslin, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School and bears the name of a longtime patient and friend of both Joslin and King. The lab—which was established with a generous gift directed by Dianne Nunnally Hoppes’ children after her passing—carries forth a long legacy of giving that started with Dianne’s own parents, who were deeply committed to helping others through their charitable efforts. Dianne’s father also had diabetes, and it was Dianne’s mother who encouraged Dianne to seek her care at Joslin. Today, Dianne’s daughters, Janet Deskevich and Alice Fruth, continue to build on the family’s philanthropic traditions and support of diabetes research at Joslin.
King and Dianne met by coincidence in Joslin’s lobby more than 25 years ago. Dianne had traveled to Boston from Richmond, VA as part of a routine trip for treatment of her type 2 diabetes, and King, having grown up in Richmond, immediately recognized her familiar accent. “I think for my mom that chance encounter really resonated with how she felt about Joslin,” says Janet. “It just felt like home.” It was the start of a long and collaborative relationship between Joslin and Dianne’s family, which now also includes Janet and Alice, as well as their spouses and children.
When Dianne passed away, it felt natural to Janet and Alice to honor her memory—and their grandparents’ legacy—by directing a gift from the family’s trust to establish King’s lab. In the years since, they have continued to support his work, helping to advance novel pilot studies that have paved the way for discovery. Recently, the family made a remarkable $2.5 million additional commitment to King’s lab, providing an infusion of resources that will fuel King’s innovative, multidisciplinary research. Specifically, their contribution will enable King to leverage leading-edge technologies to collect multiple types of clinical and biological data from individuals with and without diabetes and its complications that will transform our understanding of diabetic complications by providing mechanistic insights, new biomarkers, and therapeutic targets. Ultimately, this comprehensive molecular and metabolic analysis will be used to create an integrated database that will benefit researchers at Joslin and beyond.
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“Addressing diabetes complications is vital because they can be debilitating and are a major reason why people are so worried about diabetes”, says King. King’s prodigious research includes the discovery of the major cause of blindness in people with diabetes. This finding provided the basis for the treatment that is now most widely used for severe diabetic eye diseases. Furthermore, King founded the Medalist Study at Joslin, which has identified protective factors that might prevent the development of severe complications. This one-of-a-kind initiative is groundbreaking both in terms of the longstanding engagement it has fostered with participants over the course of decades and the robust bank of historical patient data it has created. This type of study and cohort are not available anywhere else in the world and provide a critical foundation for the comprehensive molecular and metabolic analysis King is now conducting.
King is extremely grateful for the support he’s received from Dianne’s family and its impact at this promising moment, when he and his team are on the cusp of so many pioneering breakthroughs. “This is a really exciting time for discovery, and philanthropy is critical for our research enterprise,” says King. “Dianne—and now her daughters, Janet and Alice—have been incredibly supportive to furthering our efforts, and there are now many new opportunities to elevate and advance our work.”
“There’s so much leading-edge research being done here, impacting so many people, including right in George’s lab,” says Janet. “I think my mom would have loved that this important work continues to progress and that there is still a piece of her at Joslin.”