Isidore Edelman, a chemistry researcher and physician who is credited with creating a leading biochemistry department at Columbia University, died Sunday at age 84, the university announced.

His research centered on the mechanisms by which bodily fluids and electrolytes are regulated, specifically sodium-potassium ATPase, the molecule that is the major transporter of ions across cell membranes.

Some of Edelman’s earliest contributions were to the question of how much of the human body is composed of water. One early paper on which he was lead author was titled “Studies in the human being by the dilution principle.”

After becoming a professor emeritus in 1991, Edelman founded the Columbia Genome Center, a facility dedicated to sequencing human genes.

Edelman, known to all as “Izzy,” was born in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College before receiving his medical degree from Indiana University in 1941. During World War II, he served in the Army Medical Corps as a captain assigned to the psychiatric service, where he conducted one of the earliest quality-assurance surveys. Following the war, Edelman became a resident at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, and then was named a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School.

In 1952, Edelman was appointed professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, where he initiated research into electrolytes. He became director of the UCSF Cardiovascular Research Institute in 1960.

In 1988, Edelman left his post as chief of medical service at San Francisco General Hospital to become chairman of biochemistry and molecular physics at Columbia. There he built up the staff with young researchers, one of whom, Richard Axel, won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Medicine for research relating to the physiology of smell in mammals.

At the Genome Center, Edelman was credited for greatly enlarging the facility’s scope to encompass sequencing the entire human genome and identifying genes for specific diseases. The center is credited with discovering the gene for Wilson’s disease, a rare and often fatal disorder in which the body is unable to excrete copper.

Edelman was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and was recently awarded the Robert H. Williams Prize for Distinguished Leadership by the Endocrine Society, which cited him for “outstanding scholarship, his landmark contributions in establishing the foundations of steroid hormone action, and his leadership role in bridging the disciplines of biophysics, biochemistry, endocrinology, and molecular biology.”

Isidore Samuel Edelman

Born July 24, 1920, at Brooklyn; died November 21 of cancer; survived by his wife, Roslyn, his children, Arthur Edelman, Joseph Edelman, Susan Edelman Bleckner, and Ann Korchin, and his stepdaughter, Tina Springer-Miller, nine grandchildren,