John Thornton Dunn (27 October 1932–9 April 2004), medical researcher, was born in Washington, D.C., and was the son of William LeRoy Dunn, a physician, and Thelma Flournoy Brumfield Dunn, a medical researcher who studied the origins and development of cancer in laboratory mice. About 1940 the family moved to Arlington County. Although Dunn initially aspired to be a pianist, he graduated from Princeton University in 1954 with an A.B. in biology and received an M.D. from the Duke University School of Medicine in 1958. He completed an internship at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center in 1959 and a residency at the University of Utah Hospital two years later. Dunn held research fellowships in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1961 to 1962 and again from 1963 to 1964, and at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, in New York, from 1962 to 1963. From 1964 to 1966 he was a research fellow in biochemistry at Harvard Medical School. While working at Massachusetts General, he met Margaret Ann Davis, also a scientist. They married on 30 June 1962 and had two daughters and one son.

Dunn became an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia in 1966. Continuing as a member of the medical faculty for thirty-six years, he was promoted to associate professor in 1970 and to professor in 1976. He spent the 1975–1976 academic year at the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic as a visiting scientist. Dunn's early research interests centered on thyroglobulin and its role in thyroid disease, for which he secured long-term funding from the National Institutes of Health. In 1971 the NIH honored him with its Research Career Development Award.

During his fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dunn had traveled to South America, where he became interested in iodine deficiency, one of the world's most common causes of preventable brain damage and mental retardation in children. He devoted the rest of his life to raising awareness and working to eradicate iodine deficiency disorders (IDD) worldwide.

Dunn developed methods to measure the presence and level of iodine deficiency and helped refine tests for urinary iodine to monitor iodine nutrition in local populations. Universal iodization of salt is the most efficient way to manage the chronic condition of insufficiency, and Dunn devised ways to control the iodine content of salt at production sites. In 1984 and 1985 he helped organize the International Council for the Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders (later Iodine Global Network). In 1985 he began publishing the International Council's IDD Newsletter, which he edited for nineteen years. He served as the Council's secretary from 1985 to 2001 and as executive director from April 2001 until his death.

Dunn's work with the International Council allowed him to concentrate less on medical research and focus instead on efforts to spread awareness about the devastating effects of iodine deficiency. Between 1990 and 2000 the number of households worldwide with access to iodized salt increased from about 25 percent to almost 70 percent, and in 2002 the United Nations General Assembly called for the eradication of IDD by 2005. As executive director of the Council, Dunn emphasized the development of national coalitions, collaboration among governments and international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and support for training and technical projects. As an advocate for the elimination of IDD, he served as a consultant for WHO, UNICEF, the Pan American Health Organization, the United States Agency for International Development, and the governments of approximately fifty countries. Occasionally he consulted with the pharmaceutical industry on iodine deficiency and thyroid-related drugs.

Dunn sat on the editorial boards of Thyroid: The Official Journal of the American Thyroid Association and the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and on review panels for the NIH. He wrote, sometimes in collaboration, more than sixty articles for such publications as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Thyroid. He also contributed chapters to books on thyroid diseases and iodine deficiencies. Dunn was one of a half-dozen editors who compiled a history of IDD, their treatments, and eradication programs, published as Towards the Global Elimination of Brain Damage Due to Iodine Deficiency (2004).

A member of the American Thyroid Association, Dunn received its Van Meter Award for thyroid research in 1968 and in 1997 its Paul Starr Award for his contributions to clinical thyroidology. He retired from teaching in 2002 and became professor emeritus at the University of Virginia the following year. John Thornton Dunn died of a heart attack at his Charlottesville home on 9 April 2004 and was buried at Maplewood Cemetery, in Gordonsville, in Orange County.

Sources Consulted:
Birth date in Social Security application, Social Security Administration, Office of Earnings Operations, Baltimore, Md.; Who's Who in the South and Southwest (1978–1979), 204 (with marriage date); 2003 curriculum vitae with selected bibliography, Dictionary of Virginia Biography Files, Library of Virginia; Margaret Shupnik, "1997 Paul Starr Award to John T. Dunn," Thyroid 8 (1998): 866–867; obituaries and memorials in Charlottesville Daily Progress, 11 Apr. 2004 (portrait), Richmond Times-Dispatch and Washington Post, both 14 Apr. 2004, IDD Newsletter 20 (May 2004): 17–18, Food and Nutrition Bulletin 25 (2004): 435, and Thyroid 14 (2004): 637.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leah M. Thomas.

How to cite this page:
Leah M. Thomas,"John Thornton Dunn (1932–2004)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dunn_John_Thornton, accessed [today's date]).

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