Researcher was science chief at national deafness institute

Robert J. Wenthold, 61, a neuroscientist who had been scientific director since 1968 of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, died of renal cancer Oct. 30 at his home in Bethesda.

In 1989, Dr. Wenthold cloned a member of the family of receptors for glutamate, a chemical that stimulates neurons in the brain and is important for hearing, learning and memory. The next year, he developed the first antibodies to these receptors, which were useful tools for studying their properties.

"Essentially every neuron in the brain expresses at least one of these receptors, and most express many," he said in a 1997 article in the NIH Catalyst. "So anybody studying any aspect of the brain is going to be interested in glutamate receptors."

His 1992 paper "Immunochemical Characterization of the Non-NMDA Glutamate Receptor Using Subunit-specific Antibodies," published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, "made him a household name within the neuroscience community, and his lab soon became the number one laboratory in the world for developing and characterizing these antibodies," the National Institutes of Health Record said.

"This was the paper that launched a thousand labs," agreed Michael Gottesman, NIH's deputy director for intramural research, on the Web site of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.

Dr. Wenthold published widely and was a highly cited researcher in brain science.

He started the institute's collaborative program with the University of Maryland, and that was a model for the NIH Graduate Partnerships Program.

Robert James Wenthold was born June 20, 1948, in Cresco, Iowa, and grew up on a farm. He graduated from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, and received a doctorate in biochemistry from Indiana University in 1974.

He did postdoctoral work at the NIH, then taught neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin from 1982 to 1984. He joined in 1984 what was then called the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke as a senior investigator. Five years later, he moved to the new NIDCD.

He received an NIDCD Merit Award in 1993, NIH Merit Awards in 1995, 2004 and 2006, and an NIH Graduate Partner Program's Outstanding Mentorship Award in 2008.

His hobbies included gardening, bird-watching and running.

Survivors include his wife of 38 years, Kris Wenthold of Bethesda; two children, Robert J. Wenthold Jr. of Arlington County and Elisabeth Lucas of North Haledon, N.J.; two sisters; and a granddaughter.

-- Patricia Sullivan