Mark

My dear friend John Nosta has passed away. This is a hard one on me. He was such a dear friend. His was such a brilliant mind and such a polymath. John Nosta entered university work at sixteen. He enrolled in an advanced summer program at Harvard University. His father, an electrical engineer in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, had wanted a doctor for a son. The summer tested that path. I have known John long enough to recognize the pattern that began there. He measured first. Around those years he served as president of the Perth Amboy First Aid Squad and trained as a paramedic. The work put him in acute care, among Spanish-speaking neighbors, reading the immediate mechanics of heart and survival. At Boston University he designed his own concentration in biophysics. He left for a year as a research associate at Harvard Medical School. There he joined groups studying cell volume regulation in ventricular myocardium, acute myocardial infarction, ventricular arrhythmias, and sudden cardiac death. Mentors included Thomas Smith, then chief of cardiology at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. The papers appeared while he was still an undergraduate: one in the American Journal of Physiology in 1981 on hydrostatic forces limiting swelling of rat ventricular tissue, others in Circulation and the American Journal of Cardiology the same year and the next. Smith advised an MD/PhD. John considered it and declined. He has said he went to college to study physiology but found his interests expanding into creativity, art, and philosophy, and that the conversations at Harvard ranged beyond the medical details into geopolitics, love, and art. He finished the degree at Boston University in 1981 and left the laboratory. His parents were not pleased. He moved toward writing and the translation of science into other forms. That sequence set the measure I later saw in our conversations. John held the clinical questions of volume, ischemia, and failure as a fixed reference while he examined later technologies. He wrote more than a thousand pieces on technology, medicine, and the mind. When he published The Borrowed Mind, I recognized the same generous, fearless intellect that had appeared in our talks over the years: the insistence that human thought remains the author’s own even when the tools become fluent. He called listening to certain technical accounts exponential learning. I called him a national treasure genius. Both judgments rest on the same early evidence: the summer at sixteen, the year of peer-reviewed work before the degree, and the decision to keep the questions open rather than close them inside a single profession. The public record continues from that point. God rest your soul John. John Nosta died following an aortic aneurysm. Prayers to his amazing Amy, and children Katie, Annabel, Jack, and his greater family.