Nathaniel Berlin; Cancer Center Director, Researcher

Nathaniel I. Berlin, 87, a cancer researcher at the National Institutes of Health and director of two university cancer institutes, died March 5 of cardiac and respiratory arrest at Aventura Hospital in Aventura, Fla.

Dr. Berlin, who was both a medical doctor and a PhD, held top posts in NIH's National Cancer Institute for almost 20 years and was the institute's clinical director from 1961 to 1971. He was an early advocate of mammograms for breast cancer screening.

From 1968 to 1972, Dr. Berlin was scientific director of NCI's general laboratories and clinics, then directed the Division of Cancer Biology and Diagnosis from 1972 to 1975. He left the institute in 1975 to launch the Northwestern University Cancer Center in Evanston, Ill.

He was the first director of the center, which has since become one of the nation's leading academic cancer centers, and he also taught medicine at Northwestern's medical school.

In 1987, he joined the University of Miami, where he spent five years as a professor of oncology and director of what is now the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. He retired in 1992, and returned to NIH in the mid-1990s as a visiting scholar.

Dr. Berlin was born in New York and grew up in Miami Beach. He received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1942 from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and graduated in 1945 from what is now SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

After serving in the Navy, he returned to graduate school and received a PhD in medical physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1949. He remained on the Berkeley faculty until 1953, then spent a year in England as a biochemistry researcher.

In 1954, Dr. Berlin moved to Washington and served two years as the medical officer in a secret Defense Department weapons project. He joined the NCI in 1956.

Dr. Berlin's research specialty was malignancies of the blood, but he had a broad knowledge of cancer research, diagnosis and treatment and helped establish guidelines for cancer screening. In the early 1970s, he advocated the use of mammograms in diagnosing breast cancer even though it was considered a controversial practice at the time.

He wrote hundreds of research papers, served on several NIH advisory panels, and was a lecturer and visiting professor at universities around the world.

Dr. Berlin was an amateur pianist and photographer and took international vacations well into his 80s.

His wife of 37 years, Barbara R. Berlin, died in 1990.

A younger brother, George Berlin, who was a principal developer of Aventura, the Miami suburb where Dr. Berlin lived in recent years, died March 16.

Survivors include two children, Deborah Berlin Ligenza of Chicago and Marc Berlin of Aventura; a sister; and a granddaughter.