Scientific world lost one of its notorious personalities on Monday, as Dr. Judah Folkman, the Boston researchers who discovered that interfering with cancer cell’s blood supply could slow or halt their growth, has died at the age of 74.

Folkman, director of the vascular research program at Chlildren’s Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School, suffered an apparent heart attack Monday night, The Boston Globe reported.

“The hospital and the world have lost a bright light,” Children’s Hospital and CEO Dr. James Mandell said of Dr. Folkman’s loss in a memo to employees, staff and volunteers Tuesday morning.

He revolutionized the cancer research in 1971 when he published a significant paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that proposed his initial hypothesis that doctors could fight tumors by cutting off their blood supply. This later formed the basis of the field known as angiogenesis research. Dr. Folkman said he came up with his theories while serving in the U.S. Navy in the early 1960s, at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

New anti-cancer drugs based on the concept known as angiogenesis inhibitors were manufactured due to his research. These drugs approved today in the U.S. and 27 other countries, according to Children’s Hospital, are helping many patients live longer lives. Genentech’s Avastin and Lucentis are two other drugs, which have had great success in restoring vision to people with eye disease characterized by leaky blood vessels in the back of the eye.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1933 and a graduate from Ohio State University in 1953, Dr. Folkman devoted much of his time to research. He earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School in 1957 and stayed there for much of the rest of his career.

Very famous people shouted down his ideas, said Dr. David Nathan, president emeritus of Harvard’s Dana’Farber Cancer Institute.

“He was kind and he was decent and he was friendly always, even to his critics. Judah had the most creative mind, ceaselessly creative. You could not have a conversation with Judah without having him think of the problem in a different way. He was just bubbling over with new ideas in many areas,” Dr. Nathan further said.

Dr. Folkman was the author of 389 original peer-reviewed papers. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.