I am extremely sad to announce to the readers of the EJNMMI and to the entire EANM community the passing of Dr. Stephen L. Bacharach, called Steve by all who knew him.

Many of the young colleagues have difficulty imagining that, until the end of the 70s, the golden standard of equipment was the single-head gamma camera and that scintigraphic examinations were analog, the machines not being computerized. Equipment that has now disappeared, such as rectolinear scanners and radiation detection devices w/o images, were still very widespread. Tomographic methods were based on the use of “special” collimators, with the very few PET (generally with a small ring intended only for cerebral studies) and single-head SPECT scanners, almost only as prototypes operating in an extremely limited number of centers.

For me, who began to take an interest in nuclear medicine in 1972, the great revolution, even more important than that of hybrid machines, was the one between the 70s and 80s, when the computer entered the scene and digital imaging was born, with all the prerogatives and advantages that we know today, with PET and SPECT tomographs becoming available, even on a commercial level.

In this whirlwind development, a pioneer and a major protagonist was certainly Steve Bacharach, one of the first physicists who worked in the nuclear medicine field on data processing and analysis techniques, in software development, in the improvement of mathematical models and quantitative methods, particularly in cardiology and oncology. The applied research that made him enter the history of our discipline is the one that led to gated cardiac blood pool imaging, one of the pillars on which nuclear cardiology was built, a scientific, clinical and economic driving force of nuclear medicine for many years.

Dr. Bacharach received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Cornell University and lived most of his career, i.e. for nearly 40 years, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, retiring in 2005 as a Senior Tenured Research Scientist and head of the Imaging Science Group. He also served as visiting professor in the joint MD/PhD Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University (Boston, MA), Chief Medical Worker at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, World Health Organization Consultant at Bhaba Atomic Research Center, India, Chair of Excellence at the University Carlos III in Madrid, Spain. In 2005 he became Visiting Professor of Radiology at University of California, San Francisco, where he retired in 2017. He has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific articles and many book chapters, also serving for decades on the editorial boards of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, Journal of Nuclear Cardiology, Journal of the American College of Cardiology - Cardiac imaging.

The quality and continuity of his scientific activity was recognized by the attribution, during the 2020 SNMMI Annual Meeting, of the Georg Charles de Hevesy Nuclear Pioneer Award. The then president, Vasken Dilsizian, gave him the prize with these words: ‘’Dr. Bacharach is a brilliant teacher, a thoughtful investigator, and a prolific writer. He makes the most difficult concepts in physics, nuclear medicine, and statistics easy to understand. An intellectual with marvelous human values, he is most deserving of the Award.’’ In 2005 he had also received the SNMMI Hermann Blumgart Award.

Trying to avoid the risk of rhetoric, according to which all the deceased are exceptional people, I remember him as a brilliant man, very nice, generous, a lover of music, cinema and everything that is culture. In other words, he was a VERTICAL MAN, who put his skills and his genius at the service of others, having as primary values ​​not money and power, but virtue and knowledge. May the earth be light on him.