Lewis Gibson, Cystic Fibrosis Expert, Dies At 80

Dr. Lewis E. Gibson, a pediatrician and researcher who developed a safe, highly reliable method to test children for cystic fibrosis, and later helped refine treatments for it, died on April 15 in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. He was 80.

The cause was respiratory failure, his family said.

In the 1950s, Dr. Gibson helped to devise the Gibson-Cooke sweat test, working on an observation made by other researchers and by parents, that the skin of child patients with cystic fibrosis was unusually salty. High concentrations of sodium and chloride on the skin have subsequently become a leading indicator of the disease, which can clog the lungs with mucus and interfere with the pancreas, leading to severe digestive problems and death.

With another researcher, Dr. Robert E. Cooke, Dr. Gibson stimulated sweating by swabbing a small area of skin with an alkaloid called pilocarpine, and applying a weak electric current. Sweat could then be trapped on gauze or filter paper and analyzed, causing little discomfort.

The scientists published their findings in the journal Pediatrics in 1959. The Gibson-Cooke test remains in wide use, alongside more recent and sophisticated tests developed in the 1990s to identify carriers of defective genes that cause the disease.

Dr. Thomas F. Dolan Jr., a professor emeritus of pediatrics at Yale, said that before the advent of Dr. Gibson’s test, patients were often wrapped in a plastic bag in order to obtain a sweat sample, a practice he termed “sometimes ineffective, prone to overheating the child and certainly dangerous when you’re talking about a 3-year-old being tested.”

In the early 1970s, while teaching at Yale, Dr. Gibson went on to evaluate what was then a common therapy for fibrosis patients, putting them inside a tent with a mist of water in an attempt to hydrate lungs impaired by mucus.

With Dr. Etsuro K. Motoyama, now a professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh, and others, he found the tents to be largely “ineffectual and sometimes harmful,” with the potential risk for introducing water-borne infection. Mist therapy remains controversial and has in part been supplanted by inhalers, bronchodilators and other devices.

Lewis Edwards Gibson was born in Atlanta. He graduated from Princeton and received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1953.

Dr. Gibson conducted research at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases before he was named an assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins in 1964. He moved to Yale in 1966, and directed Yale’s cystic fibrosis program from 1968 to 1971. Dr. Gibson then taught at Northwestern, Rush University and Loyola University in Chicago, where he was chairman of the pediatrics department from 1977 to 1983. He retired from Loyola, as a professor emeritus of pediatrics, in 1996.

Dr. Gibson is survived by his wife, Dr. Patricia Nell, an allergist. Two previous marriages ended in divorce. He is also survived by two sons, Peter, of Grosseto, Italy, and Richard, of Newbury Park, Calif.; two daughters, Ellen of Evanston, Ill., and Katharine of New York City; and six grandchildren.

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