Daniel Michael Musher is an American physician, scientist, and medical educator working in the field of infectious diseases, who has coauthored more than 600 publications. Musher is a Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Professor of Molecular Virology and Microbiology at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
Musher was born in New York in 1938 to Hadassah and Sidney Musher.[1] His father[2] was a food chemist and inventor,[2] and his mother a school teacher. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School and then Harvard College magna cum laude[3] in history. He went on to Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, served as an intern and resident on the Columbia division of Bellevue Hospital, and then entered the military, where he was head of internal medicine at Laredo Air Force Base from 1965-1967.[4] Musher was then an NIH Fellow at Tufts-New England Medical Center under the mentorship of Louis Weinstein.[3]
Musher’s principal scientific contributions have been in bacterial diseases. He called attention to the role of the macrophage in the immune response to syphilis,[5] described the spectrum and noted the increasing importance of infection due to Staphylococcus aureus,[6] recognized non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae,[7] and Moraxella catarrhalis[8] as common causes of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), developed the currently used ELISA for measuring antibody to pneumococcal capsular polysaccharide, studied the response to pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine[9] and demonstrated that variable responsiveness was governed by genetic factors,[10] called attention to acute cardiac events during pneumococcal pneumonia[11] and other acute infections[12] reported on the etiology of CAP[13] and showed that normal respiratory flora cause CAP in some proportion of cases.[14]
He has written chapters on pneumonia and pneumococcal infections for textbooks of medicine and has co-authored national guidelines for management of CAP. His work has been recognized with the DeBakey Medal for research, the CDC’s Nakano citation for epidemiology and the Outstanding Clinician and Teacher award by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.[15]