{credit}United States Senate{/credit}

Arlen Specter, a former US Senator from Pennsylvania and one of Washington’s biggest boosters of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), died on 14 October at age 82. He succumbed to complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), his son Shanin told media outlets including the New York Times.

During his 30-year career in the US Senate, Specter was a passionate advocate for biomedical research even before he underwent cardiac bypass surgery, was diagnosed with a brain tumour and later fought NHL, a blood malignancy.

A Republican until he switched parties in 2009, Specter “worked for decades to increase our country’s investment in lifesaving medical research,” his Senate colleague Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said in a statement.

Francis Collins, the NIH director, issued a statement calling Specter “the epitome of a public servant” and said: “I truly miss Arlen’s steady hand and vision for our agency.”

“Patients, their families, and the research community lost a legendary leader today,” added Darrell Kirch, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Specter was a big proponent of the doubling of the NIH budget over a five-year period that ended in 2003. He also vocally supported US government funding of human embryonic stem cell research and was almost singlehandedly responsible for the NIH receiving over $10 billion as part of the economic stimulus package that Congress passed in early 2009, during the throes of the recession.

Because his vote was crucial to passage of that bill in a Senate sharply divided on partisan lines, Specter was able to insist that the huge bolus for NIH be included.

Specter also crafted legislation authorizing the Cures Acceleration Network, a new NIH programme to speed high-needs cures from the laboratory to the bedside. It was written into the health reform law of 2010.

Harkin and others said that the politically moderate Specter embodied a spirit of bipartisanship that is increasingly rare in the US Congress today. But his conversion to the Democratic Party ultimately cost him his Senate seat in 2010, when he failed to win the Democratic primary nomination that would have allowed him to seek re-election that year.

Updated on 15 October to include Francis Collins’ statement.