Virginia Weldon, pioneering doctor and SLSO fundraiser, dies at 88

As a trailblazing physician, Dr. Virginia Weldon became the first woman to chair the Association of American Medical Colleges. As a patron of the arts, she used her position on the board of trustees for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to help bring it back from the brink of bankruptcy.

She was included in a children’s book about diabetes and was interviewed by Mike Wallace for a “60 Minutes” segment to discuss the health implications of drinking diet soda.

“She was pretty cool,” said Weldon’s younger daughter, Susie Erlinger of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Weldon died Thursday at her home in Creve Coeur. She was 88 and had recently had surgery for a perforated colon.

Born in 1935 in Toronto, Weldon moved to the United States as a young child. In 1962, she was one of three women to earn their medical degrees from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine in New York.

“The men would say to her, ‘You don’t belong here,’” said Ann Doyle, Weldon’s older daughter, of San Francisco. “And she would just prove otherwise.”

At the time, her daughters said, there were two options for women who went into medicine: pediatrics and obstetrics.

Weldon chose pediatrics, with a focus on endocrinology. She dedicated her medical career to treating children with diabetes and growth disorders and was recognized for her research in growth-hormone deficiency. During her residency at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Weldon met her first husband, a cardiothoracic surgeon.

In 1968, the couple, who now had two little girls, moved to St. Louis. Weldon was hired by Washington University as a professor of pediatrics; when she left the school two decades later, it was as vice president of its medical center.

“She was very ambitious,” said Doyle. “She resisted any ideas that there were only certain paths available to her.”

At home, she taught her daughters to sew and learned to play the piano alongside them. During the summers, she mandated that her girls listen to an hour of classical music per day. She did not cook, they said. But she was always impeccably dressed.

At work, Weldon’s focus was shifting. In 1989, she took a position as the vice president of scientific affairs at Monsanto. During her tenure, she regularly traveled to Washington to lobby for the agritech giant.

President Bill Clinton appointed her to serve on a committee of advisers on science and technology and on the National Committee on Agriculture Biotechnology. She retired almost a decade later as Monsanto’s senior vice president of public policy.

Weldon reflected on her profession during an interview with the National Institutes of Health.

“I was looking for a challenging career — one that was constantly changing,” she said. “I really didn’t find many obstacles.”

Starting in the mid-1980s, Weldon set her sights on the places and organizations she was most passionate about in her adopted hometown. She served on boards for the St. Louis Zoo and St. Louis Science Center and helped establish the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a nonprofit research institution.

“She sort of had her hands in everything,” Erlinger said.

Weldon’s love for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra bloomed after the first concert she attended, not long after she moved to the city. But their formal relationship started in 1992, when she was asked to join the board of trustees. She was chair of the board from 2000 until 2005, a period marked by a financial crisis for the orchestra. Weldon worked her contacts and was instrumental, her daughters said, in securing a $40 million gift from Andrew Taylor, then the president of Enterprise.

She continued to raise funds even after she left the board, leading a drive in 2012 to pay for the symphony orchestra’s first European tour that century.

“She was really committed to building up the institutions of St. Louis,” said Doyle.

In addition to her daughters, Weldon is survived by her second husband, Francis Austin; and three grandchildren. Memorials may be made to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. Plans for a funeral service have not yet been finalized.