Stewart Sell
Jan. 20, 1935 – June 16, 2023

Saxophone in hand, a tuxedo-clad Stewart Sell (MD ’60) smiles alongside his bandmates in a photograph featured on their website (www.swingdocs.com). Swing Docs, a band that Sell started in the 1990s, has played shows in upstate New York for the past 25 years as a cohort of health care providers/musicians. This year, they lost their founder and their alto sax lead when Sell died in June at 88.

Sell, a groundbreaking liver cancer pathologist and stem cell researcher, spent a 50-year-plus career studying “the cellular evolution that leads from a normal cell to a cancer cell, providing ideas and hypotheses, most of them proven,” as his colleague and Pitt’s former chair of pathology George K. Michalopoulos, Distinguished Professor, describes it. Sell’s career began at Pitt Med, where he earned his medical degree as his father, surgeon Oliver Sell (MD ’26) had. (The elder Sell was a Pitt Med professor from 1945-55.) Sell also started his research career at Pitt Med, studying under Frank Dixon, MD chair of pathology during the 1950s, who is considered the founder of immunopathology.

Sell returned to Pitt for five years as a faculty member after completing his pathology residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and postgraduate research fellowships at the National Institutes of Health and in Birmingham, England. After subsequently working at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, he joined the faculty at Albany Medical College as director of the Division of Experimental Pathology in 2003, where he remained until he retired. For his work developing the test for alpha-fetoprotein, which allows screening for birth defects and has contributed to a better understanding of liver cancer’s root cause, Pitt honored Sell as a Legacy Laureate in 2005.

Sell’s colleagues remember him as a driving force in cancer research, particularly in cancer stem cells—and as an exacting investigator. Former Pitt Med student and faculty member Bryon Petersen (PhD ’96), a famed stem cell scientist now at the University of Florida, recalls that “Stewart would hold your feet to the fire to defend the research, but he’d also give praise and acknowledgment for the work.”

His generous spirit is also remembered. Pitt associate professor of medicine and hematologist-oncologist Richard Steinman (Res ’90, Fel ’92), an MD, PhD, recalls Sell as “brightening the eyes of the students he met,” whether in the lecture hall or after a Scope and Scalpel performance.

While the Swing Docs will honor Sell in perpetuity through their music, his research legacy is preserved at Pitt Med. In 2019, he and his family established the Sell Family Physician Scientist Award, which recognizes students training to be physician scientists. 

Read more from the Fall 2023 issue.