She completed her internship and residency at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore and spent two years at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute before returning to Johns Hopkins as a faculty member. She married another faculty member, Dr. George Bulkley. They later divorced.
President Ronald Reagan named Dr. Healy deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1984. The next year, she became chairman of the Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, where she met her second husband, Dr. Floyd D. Loop.
Besides her husband, of Gates Mills, survivors include a daughter from her first marriage, Bartlett Anne Russell of Washington, and a daughter from her second marriage, Marie McGrath Loop of Gates Mills.
When President George H.W. Bush recalled Dr. Healy to Washington in 1991, she joked that “things are so bad, some have said, they couldn’t even get a man to be NIH director.”
The agency had been without a permanent director for 20 months, scientists were leaving in record numbers because of low pay and lower morale, the politicization of scientific agendas worried many, congressional investigations into allegations of misconduct were underway, and accusations of sexism and racism pervaded the hiring and promotion process.
The NIH governance was balkanized as well, and Dr. Healy quickly began planning a reorganization and setting research priorities. She established an award program to try to keep talented scientists who were being lured away for better pay in the private sector, oversaw the development of a major intramural genetics laboratory and set up what is now the National Institute of Nursing Research.
Dr. Healy lived for many years in Washington, commuting on weekends to be with her family in Cleveland. When the Clinton administration failed to reappoint her at the NIH, she became medical dean at Ohio State University. She ran unsuccessfully for Ohio’s Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate in 1994.
As president of the American Heart Association in 1998, she initiated programs for women and minorities. She received a brain tumor diagnosis that year and recovered after surgery and chemotherapy.
Dr. Healy was recruited to run the American Red Cross in 1999, at twice the salary of her predecessor, Elizabeth Dole. She quickly found that her decision-making, so apt in an emergency room or surgical theater, ruffled the feathers of the 50-member Red Cross board, which had gotten used to being a loose confederation rather than a tightly knit, centralized organization.
Five months after she took over, the FDA found violations in how the Red Cross handled its blood supply, at the headquarters itself.
After leaving the agency at the end of 2001, Dr. Healy worked as a TV health commentator and columnist for U.S. News and World Report, and she wrote two books, including a chronicle of her fight against brain cancer.
“Professionally, I am proud that I never compromised my core beliefs, never wobbled on what I believed to be the right path, and had the strength to endure both,” she said for an NIH biography project.
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