History of Immunology

Researchers have always practiced honorary authorship, but the rise of artificial intelligence is making it even easier.

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As he prepares to retire, “America’s doctor” reflects on his long career.

Profiles in Leadership / The Geography of Immunology Karl F. Meyer: The Renaissance Immunologist by Charles Richter and John S. Emrich June/July 2018, pages 22–27 In a career spanning 65 years and three continents, Karl F. Meyer (AAI 1922, president 1940–41), known as “K.F.” to his colleagues, was a true renaissance immunologist. He not only made numerous advances in the understanding of human and animal diseases, but also introduced revolutionary theories of disease transmission and successfully straddled the academy-industry line. He established the Department of Bacteriology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he worked for over 60 years. His legacy of research, teaching, and service seems almost too great for one scientist EDUCATION Meyer was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1884. His interest in pathology began in childhood, when his biology teacher brought fish with tumors or other anomalies to class for the students to examine. Young Karl was captivated by the possibility of looking at the specimen under a microscope and seeing a parasite that may have been the cause of the malformation. The role of parasites in disease was just beginning to be understood—Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran had first observed the malaria parasite with a microscope in 1880— so Meyer was experiencing a scientific revolution right in his classroom. At the age of 18, Meyer enrolled at the University of Basel and, after one semester, transferred to the University of Zurich because of its renowned comparative anatomy department. He excelled in his studies there, passing first qualifying examinations in zoology, botany, physics, and chemistry with flying colors. Because of his interest in tissue sectioning and microscopic structure, one of Meyer’s professors recommended that he study under Heinrich Zangger, a professor of physiology at the university’s veterinary school. Meyer considered his move to the veterinary school to be the true beginning of his career. There, he was able to immerse himself in human and animal physiology and biochemistry. His second qualifying examinations were in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and histology, and led to his graduate study. Arriving at the University of Bern for his doctoral thesis work in 1906, Meyer wanted to work in the laboratory of Theodor Langhans but was initially rebuffed by the eminent German pathologist. Two days later, while Langhans was performing an autopsy, Meyer decided to surreptitiously remove a sample of a jaw tumor from the cadaver, pickle it, and create sections in which he found liver cells. He took the slides to Langhans, who—without knowing where they came from—agreed with Meyer’s diagnosis of a teratoma. When Meyer told him where he had acquired the sample, Langhans was so impressed by the speed and quality of the sections that he hired him on the spot for his lab. Because of the oddities in the Swiss university system and Meyer’s diverse work with many advisors, his D.V.M. was awarded by the University of Zurich in 1909 even though he did none of his actual graduate work there. EARLY CAREER Soon after receiving his doctorate, Meyer went to work in South Africa with the Swiss veterinarian Arnold Theiler. He intended to assist in the manufacture of rabies vaccine for local use at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Research Institute. His duties quickly multiplied there and he eventually butted heads with Theiler, founder of Onderstepoort and pillar of veterinary sciences in the country. They disagreed whether African East Coast Fever (theileriosis) could be transmitted in the absence of ticks. When Meyer successfully demonstrated both transmission and possible immunization of the disease through tissue transplants, contrary to Theiler’s previously published research, Theiler demanded that the results be published under his name as the director of the institute. Meyer refused, and the two never spoke directly to one another again. Eventually, Theiler had to admit that he had been wrong, but Meyer was long gone from Africa by that time. In 1910, Meyer came to the United States when he accepted the position of assistant professor of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania. Although the intellectual community of Philadelphia welcomed him, he later recalled finding his students at Penn disappointing, and constantly feeling like an outsider at the university. But his experiences in South Africa garnered him invitations to join the Pennsylvania Livestock Sanitary Board and the Philadelphia Milk Commission; both provided satisfying and familiar challenges. His experiences with these industry-related organizations would prepare him for a long legacy of consultation to ensure food safety. In these first few years in the United States, Meyer also had opportunities to meet many of the giants of early immunology at Penn and at scientific meetings, including John A. Kolmer (AAI 1913, president 1917–18), Victor C. Vaughan (AAI 1915), and Theobald Smith (AAI 1920). They helped convince him that the United States was “worth staying around for.” Then in early 1913 a new opportunity arose. Meyer went for lunch with his colleague at Penn, Richard M. Pierce, who immediately told him, “You’re going to California.” Not only did Pierce have a lead on a job working with Frederick P. Gay (AAI 1918, president 1921–22) at the University of California, Berkeley, but he had also heard about the enormous grant from the Hooper family to establish an institute of medical research at UCSF, which Pierce believed could become “the Rockefeller Institute of the West.” Meyer was initially skeptical about moving to California, but he took the job at Berkeley and, in 1915, also joined the faculty at the newly established Hooper Foundation at UCSF. This was the first medical research foundation in the United States to be incorporated as a university department and he became its second director in 1921. After crossing the equator twice, the Atlantic Ocean and the United States once, and countless time zones, Meyer finally found a permanent home in the Golden State, where he remained affiliated with both Berkeley and UCSF in various capacities for the rest of his life. In California, Meyer found the freedom he had long sought to explore his many immunological interests. He could investigate a particular topic, move on to another problem, and return to the original matter with new insights. Over his long career one constant was his drive to understand how diseases could lie dormant and unnoticed for years before producing a sudden outbreak. His work on disease cycles led him to introduce a new concept: reservoirs of disease. This line of thinking was instrumental in fighting plague in the American West and also helped him develop effective methods to ensure food safety across multiple industries. LATENT INFECTIONS AND RESERVOIRS OF DISEASE The myriad of diseases that Meyer had studied led him to reconsider the basic relationship between humans, animals, and pathogens. He argued that it was wrong to approach infections “from the standpoint, not of the agent, but of the altered state of the host—the disease.” The ability to identify subclinical infections had proven this approach untenable. Instead, by the 1930s, Meyer wanted to base disease research on the “biologic definition of an infection as a host-parasite relationship.” A notorious tainted spaghetti casserole incident two decades earlier helped lead Meyer toward this way of thinking about disease. In the days following a 1914 church dinner in Hanford, California, 93 people who had eaten food from the dinner contracted typhoid fever. Meyer was part of the team led by Wilbur A. Sawyer, director of the Hygienic Laboratory of the California State Board of Health, that investigated the cause of the outbreak. By interviewing the typhoid patients in the growing San Joaquin Valley town about the dishes they had sampled and cross-checking against the menu, it was determined that the culprit was a baked spaghetti dish. Among those who participated in preparing the dish was a boarding-house operator whose medical history suggested she was likely a typhoid carrier. By preparing replica casseroles inoculated with typhoid, Sawyer showed that it would have been impossible for the spaghetti to have been heated sufficiently to kill the typhoid bacteria. When Meyer dug into the story, he felt it was emblematic of “a lack of social consciousness” that pushed him to advocate for public health and preventive medicine. To do this, he would have to understand why some infections remained latent but transmissible. A recollection from his early days in Zurich at the turn of the century provided some insight: in the autopsy room, 98 percent of people who died from causes other than tuberculosis nevertheless had tubercle lesions, leading Meyer to call the population “tuberculinized.” In the early 1920s, Meyer and his colleagues started to think about infection from the perspective of a parasitologist, noticing that “when you had a roundworm or flatworm infection, you frequently didn’t show any symptoms at all.” By 1928, he was in the practice of referring to bacteria and viruses as “parasites” and considering “the ability of the animal or the man to accept this parasite” as a critical element in the transition from infection to disease. Around 1930, an abnormally high incidence of tularemia infection among people bitten by dogs in Sonoma County caught his attention, and he soon had a eureka moment. Although the dogs showed no clinical signs of the disease, upon examination, they were found to have produced antibodies against the bacterium. The dogs were latent carriers, transmitting tularemia from a larger reservoir of infected rabbits to unfortunate humans. In his 1931 Ludvig Hektoen Lecture, Meyer articulated the theory of the animal kingdom as a reservoir of disease and hoped that this model would lead to novel approaches for dealing with emerging zoonoses. Eventually, he catalogued dozens of diseases by their specific animal carrier paths, allowing him to recommend likely strategies for diagnosis and elimination, including destruction of infected animals, vaccination where possible, or abatement of insect vectors. PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAVING INDUSTRIES Throughout his career, Meyer worked with various food industries to improve food safety, sometimes saving them from complete ruin. Very soon after arriving in San Francisco, he questioned the testing methods for bovine tuberculosis and arranged with the San Francisco Milk Commission to test the milk supply. He discovered that none of the certified milk carried tuberculosis, but “all the first-class milk in San Francisco was infected with Brucella.” This finding led to extensive study on the pathogenicity of Brucella, especially in infants. In the course of the milk investigations, one dairy was found to be producing milk contaminated with human streptococci, which was causing septic sore-throat epidemics. Meyer’s team cultured every worker in the dairy, and if they found one infected with hemolytic streptococci, the worker had a choice: “he was either discharged, or at the expense of the Milk Commission, he was tonsillectomized.” In 1919, Meyer was brought in to advise an informal consortium of California’s largest canning companies on the problem of botulism in canned food, as he had taught courses on anaerobic infections during the First World War. Tainted California olives had caused deaths in the Midwest, leading to quarantines on all California canned goods in Michigan and Ohio. Some canners were ready to stop canning olives altogether. Meyer, recognizing that the canners did not have a scientifically sound method for food sterilization, exploded at this proposed solution: Absolutely no! Because your whole canning procedure is empiricism. I can just visualize what happens. You figure on the cuff of your shirt the time and temperature which you think is necessary to sterilize the product. Then you put it in a retort which is not controlled. After having given it a cook for such-and-such a time it goes in the warehouse, and if it doesn’t blow up in the next forty-eight hours, this thing is safe. Convinced that Meyer could provide an effective research plan to eliminate botulism, the director of the National Canners Association asked him to present the canners with a budget the next morning. Meyer and Ernest Dickson of Stanford sat down at the Pig’n Whistle restaurant in downtown San Francisco and worked out an annual budget over tea. When Meyer tabulated it at $30,000, Dickson slumped in his seat, thinking the canners would never underwrite such an amount. Nevertheless, Meyer took the budget to the meeting with the canners. R. I. Bentley, president of the California Packing Corporation, pointed out that his company alone was losing $70,000 a week under the Midwest quarantines, so the research proposal was easily justified. Even in 1919, canning was a multi-billion dollar industry. Over the next three years, Meyer developed techniques for testing and sterilizing canned foods that would reliably neutralize any Clostridium botulinum spores without destroying the food itself. Later in life, he joked that he had become “one of the most fantastic parasites” on the big canning companies—a parasite that they could not live without. PLAGUE Plague, in all its manifestations, had fascinated Meyer ever since his time in Africa, where he saw cases of the disease firsthand. When he arrived in San Francisco, the city had recently experienced a number of outbreaks spread by rats around the port. These included a nearly four-year (1900– 1904) bubonic plague epidemic centered in the Chinatown section, and another following the 1906 earthquake. In the rural areas far from the port, however, reports of plague posed a medical mystery in that they contradicted the current medical theories on the transmission of the disease. According to the leading theory about plague, a rat was a necessary vector to transport the fleas that carried the disease. In 1903, federal investigators found that workers on the Southern Pacific Railroad had contracted bubonic plague despite no evidence of contact with rats. Four years later, a fatal case of plague in Contra Costa County provided new clues as the investigation focused on local ground squirrels, which were found to be widely infected. Almost immediately upon arriving in California in 1913, Meyer had his first opportunity to see for himself how the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) handled plague research under George McCoy (AAI 1916, president 1922–23). Meyer learned how to identify plague via dissection of ground squirrels and was struck by how many infected animals the federal researchers discovered, confirming once and for all, that wild rodents were carriers of plague. But two years later, the PHS did something that Meyer considered “most unfortunate”—it announced that the fumigation of ground squirrel burrows had eradicated plague from California. Of course, these measures had not actually solved the problem, and Meyer was asked to consult on a pneumonic plague outbreak in 1919. Meyer was never one to allow himself to be confined to the lab; he was just as likely to be in the field hunting squirrels for dissection. A major breakthrough came in 1924, when squirrel fleas were found on rats in the middle of an outbreak in Los Angeles. Meyer began to believe that “under certain conditions squirrel plague could have been transmitted to rats and in rats it began to burn in a typical rat epizootic.” After a similar outbreak in 1928, Meyer coined the term “sylvatic plague.” Unlike bubonic or pneumonic plague, sylvatic plague refers not to the type of Yersinia pestis infection, but rather to the reservoir of the bacterium situated in the wild rodent populations. Under Meyer’s theory, plague outbreaks were not dependent on foreign vectors entering a port—the disease had made itself at home in the United States. Human cases of plague kept appearing in places where no evidence of the disease had been found in the local fauna; to Meyer, this simply meant that existing methods of detection were inadequate. Taking a cue from the old practices of the famed Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburo, who is credited with co-discovering the infectious agent of bubonic plague with Alexandre Yersin in 1894, Meyer began combing fleas from wild rodents and inoculating the fleas. This technique revealed that although there were no gross lesions in any of the thousand rodent specimens, samples from five percent of the fleas produced fatal plague in guinea pigs. From this data, Meyer hypothesized that the persistence of plague in a given area was dependent on how resistant the local rodent populations were. This new way of thinking about disease would soon dramatically alter public health strategies in California and the wider American West. By 1935, the PHS and the California Department of Public Health were working with the Hooper Foundation to find and study plague throughout the Western states. They soon identified reservoirs in at least 12 states, in populations of ground squirrels, wood rats, chipmunks, prairie dogs, and marmots. Eventually, hundreds of wild rodent species were discovered to be carriers of plague. These discoveries led to the first wide-ranging rodent abatement programs on military bases, beginning close to San Francisco at Fort Ord. To study the transmission of Yersinia pestis more closely, Meyer sought to construct an entire “town” for his ever-increasing plague research. UCSF told him that it was too dangerous to “work with the black death” on campus, but the Rosenberg Foundation donated funds for a special secure laboratory where the work could be done safely. One room held what became known as “Mouse Town, U.S.A.”—a large mouse enclosure split down the middle to allow tests of transmission and prophylaxis. The floor of the room was sprinkled with crystals of DDT and kept spotlessly white so any flea that managed to hop the walls of Mouse Town would be immediately visible. Meyer placed 100 mice on each side of “town” and dosed the water of the west side with sulfadiazine. He then allowed 800 plague-infected fleas to invade Mouse Town with the freedom to cross the central barrier. Within days, plague was raging on the east side, but the sulfa-dosed mice on the west side remained healthy. Meyer’s findings in this and other Mouse Town experiments led to antibiotic prophylaxis methods to prevent plague infection, as well as improved vaccines for plague. The isolation unit produced millions of doses of effective plague vaccine for military use: in 1964, not a single case of plague was reported throughout the U.S. armed forces, even among troops stationed in areas where plague infection occurred in the local population. Karl F. Meyer’s tireless research was so foundational and wide-ranging that he won the 1951 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. This honor was not for any single discovery, but for “Mechanism of parasites infection”—a fitting summary of decades of work. The Lasker committee recognized that Meyer bore: ... a major share of responsibility for the control of botulism, and for a classification and international identification center for the clostridia; for our recognition that plague is sylvatic, not merely rat-borne; for understanding of the broad spectrum of brucellosis rather than restricted goat-borne Malta-fever; for the concept of ornithosis rather than psittacosis; for elucidating the role of the arthropod vector in western equine encephalomyelitis; for showing that western ticks are also responsible for relapsing fever; for studying the dinoflagellate causing mussel poisoning; for increasing our knowledge of leptospirosis; for valuable assistance with investigations of Q fever. In addition to his research, Meyer offered his professional service to government advisory committees, the National Academy of Science, the World Health Organization, and many professional organizations, including AAI. He served as the 27th president of AAI and, for over two decades, as an editor for The Journal of Immunology. He was also a dedicated, creative, and memorable educator who left his mark on generations of doctoral students. Meyer was a true renaissance immunologist whose wide-ranging work was invaluable to the field. References Cavanaugh, Dan C. “K. F. Meyer’s Work on Plague.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases 129, supplement (1974): S10–S12. Chesnutt, James G. “The AAAS-George Westinghouse Science Writing Awards for 1946: The Prize Winner.” The Scientific Monthly 64, no. 1 (1947): 76–79. Gutsche, Thelma. There Was a Man: The Life and Times of Sir Arnold Theiler K.C.M.G of Onderstepoort. Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1979. Meyer, Karl F. “The Animal Kingdom, a Reservoir of Human Disease.” Annals of Internal Medicine 29, no. 2 (1948): 326–346. Meyer, Karl F. Interview by Edna Tartaul Daniel. Regional Oral History Center. The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley, 1961 and 1962. Transcript. Meyer, Karl F. and Oliver R. McCoy. “Plague.” in Preventative Medicine in World War II, vol. VII: Communicable Diseases; Arthopodborne Diseases Other Than Malaria. Edited by John Boyd Coates. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964. Meyer, Marion Lewis. “A Brief History of the George Williams Hooper Foundation for Medical Research, University of California, San Francisco.” J. Michael Bishop papers, MSS 2007-21, carton 19, folder 67. UC San Francisco Library, Special Collections. Sabin, Albert D. “Karl Friedrich Meyer, 1884–1974.” Biographical Memoirs. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1980. Sawyer, Wilbur A. “Ninety-Three Persons Infected By a Typhoid Carrier at a Public Dinner.” Journal of the American Medical Association 63, no. 18 (1914): 1537–1542. In History History Articles Oral History History of Immunology and Science Timeline Notable Members Nobel Laureates Lasker Awardees Distinguished Scientific Awards AAAS Fellows NAS Electees In Memoriam StoryBooth Past Presidents and Officers Past Presidents' Messages History Projects

How will covid-19 transform the United States? The country’s last mass pandemic, the 1918 flu, caused lasting social, medical and political changes.

Hero Horses in the Fight Against Disease by Charles Richter and John Emrich October 2021 Painting depicting diphtheria, c. 1912 Wellcome CollectionIn the December 10, 1894, edition of the New York Herald, a headline announced: “ANTI-TOXINE FOR THE POOR.” After three years of rising death tolls among the city’s children due to diphtheria, the newspaper was making an appeal to its readers for donations to support a new and exciting medical treatment: antitoxin serum. The publishers of the Herald pledged $1,000 to begin the fund drive, and the money began coming in rapidly, doubling the initial pledge in only four days. In daily updates, readers were informed about the science behind the new treatment and the scientists at the Pasteur Institute and the New York City Department of Health who created it. Readers also learned about the crucial role of horses in serum production, beginning a long tradition of recognizing hero horses in the biologics industry. Diphtheria Death caused by diphtheria was not uncommon in late 19th century New York City. In the century’s next-to-last decade, two spasms of epidemic diphtheria had ripped through the city, claiming 4,894 and 4,509 citizens in 1881 and 1887 respectively. Diphtheria is caused by the Corynebacterium diphtheriae bacteria, identified in 1883 by Edwin Klebs, and typically transmitted human to human via respiratory droplets. The bacteria secrete a powerful toxin that damages body tissue, predominantly in the mucosal membranes. Early symptoms are indistiguishable from other infections: sore throat, low-grade fever, malaise, and loss of appetite. But as the disease progresses, the most identifiable symptom of diphtheria appears—first a bluish-white membrane on the tonsils, soon followed by a thick gray-green substance spread over the tonsils, larynx, and nasal tissue. Known as a pseudomembrane, it adheres to tissue and is caused by the release of toxins that increase waste products and proteins. For patients who do not experience early recovery, the disease progresses to a more critical stage. Toxins can travel to and damage internal organs, including the heart, kidney, and liver, causing neuritis, and obstructing the airway (giving diphtheria its nickname of “the strangling angel of children”). If enough toxin is absorbed, the patient can lapse into a coma. Death can occur in six to ten days. Diphtheria was a major cause of illness and death in children, and in 1890 “about one half” of the deaths caused by diphtheria and croup occurred in children under the age of five. In the 1890 census, diphtheria was the sixth highest cause of death in the United States for the previous year, behind only consumption (tuberculosis), pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, heart disease, and stillbirth. If deaths caused from diphtheria (27,815) and croup (13,862) are combined (97.75 per 100,000 of population), diphtheria becomes the number four known cause of death. (In the late 19th century “the majority of cases of death attributed to croup are due to diphtheria of the upper air passages.”) For comparison, the corresponding death rate in 1890 from diphtheria and croup was, in England and Wales, 28.8; in Ireland, 21.3; in Scotland, 44.0; in Belgium, 56.5; in Prussia, 145.4; in Austria, 120.0; and in Italy, 50.0. Antitoxin Bleeding a Horse for Serum, 1894 New York HeraldThe first successful treatment for diphtheria was the administration of an antitoxin. An antitoxin serum was produced by inoculating horses with small amounts of the diphtheria toxin—enough to immunize without harming the animals. The horses would then be bled periodically. The technician would cool the blood and separate the antitoxin-rich serum from the clotted red blood cells using mouth or mechanical suction. Emil von Behring had discovered this process in 1890, and diphtheria antitoxin produced via a methodology created by Émile Roux at the Pasteur Institute was being used with great success in Europe. The small amounts of antitoxin brought to the United States by individual scientists saved a few lives but could not put a dent in the growing diphtheria problem here. Diphtheria Antitoxin in New York At the New York City Department of Health, pathologist Hermann R. Biggs and laboratory director William H. Park (AAI 1916, AAI president 1918–1919) were following the news from Europe about the successes of antitoxin treatment, and along with several other leading physicians and scientists, appealed to the Herald to start the fund drive. Their backing prompted many New Yorkers, rich and poor, to make contributions. Nathan Strauss, owner of Macy’s, gave $500, while others gave a dollar or took up small collections at their offices. World-famous opera singers and actors made significant donations as well. Serum Horse Record Book, NYC, 1909 National Museum of American HistoryJust five days after the initial announcement, Biggs, Park, and T. Mitchell Prudden began inoculation of the first horses at the Department of Health, and quickly expanded the antitoxin production facility into new stables that they called the “Herald Annex.” Park and his new colleague Anna Wessels Williams (AAI 1918) were able to improve upon Roux’s method for making diphtheria toxin with which to inoculate the horses. Williams had compared several different strains and found one that produced as much toxin in vitro in one week as Roux’s had in a month. By Christmas 1894, 30 horses were busy producing antitoxin. On the first day of the new year, Park administered the first doses of serum treatment to two children at the Willard Parker Hospital, with “favorable reactions,” even though one of the children had not been expected to survive. Park immediately began a six-week trial of the antitoxin and demonstrated that when given to patients early in the disease’s course, it was effective in stopping further progression. This success led to the widespread adoption of serum production by municipal health departments in many other American cities. Preparing the Serum Popular Science A year after the initial fundraising appeal went out, the Department of Health passed a resolution acknowledging the contributions of the Herald Anti-Toxine Fund, which eventually totaled $7,496.82, to help begin the production of antitoxin and make it available to the poor of the city. The St. Louis Antitoxin Tragedy Following New York’s success, St. Louis, MO, set up a municipal diphtheria antitoxin production facility, but lack of careful oversight led to tragedy. A retired milk-wagon horse named Jim provided the serum for the city’s antitoxin, which initially proved effective. But at the end of October 1901, May and Bessie Baker, two sisters aged four and six, died after being given diphtheria antitoxin. Their two-year-old brother died a few days later, also after receiving antitoxin treatment. Diphtheria did not kill them, though; they all died of tetanus. The children’s doctor, R. C. Harris, had been called to treat Bessie, who was suffering a severe case of diphtheria. He gave the antitoxin to all three children as a precaution. Harris reported the deaths to the St. Louis Health Department and discovered that at least two other children who had received antitoxin from the city supply had also been killed by otherwise unexplained tetanus. Inquest Amand Ravold, 1901 St. Louis Republic Officials at the Health Department began an investigation and within days announced that the serum had come from a horse named Jim. The old horse had been inoculated on September 22 and bled on September 30. His handlers recognized signs of tetanus the very next day and euthanized Jim on October 2. According to the Health Department’s records, none of the serum from the September 30 blood draw had been distributed or used. Jim had also provided serum on August 24, but at that time he had been in perfect health. All of the serum had been prepared under the supervision of the city bacteriologist, Amand Ravold. By November 5, 11 St. Louis children had succumbed to a painful death from tetanus, and a legal inquest had begun taking testimony. A veterinarian testified that Jim should have been immunized against tetanus, a practice that was “in vogue” at east coast antitoxin facilities. Robert Funkhouser, the city coroner, determined that serum from the September 30 blood draw had in fact been used to produce serum, and furthermore that some of that serum had been mislabeled as part of the August 24 batch. He confirmed through testing that this serum was tainted with tetanus toxin. Testimony On November 30, assistant bacteriologist Martin Schmidt finally broke his silence, testifying that Ravold had not tested the serum on guinea pigs before its release. He had kept quiet about this because of his personal friendship with Ravold. Schmidt also implicated Henry Taylor, an African American janitor in the Department of Health, who had been given unlabeled flasks of serum from both blood draws and directed to bring them to Schmidt, with no way to distinguish them but reliance on his own memory. Taylor, of course, had no idea that any of the serum was tainted. The final outcome of the inquest was the dismissal of both Ravold and Taylor. Officially, responsibility for the deaths of 13 children was judged to be Ravold’s. Taylor bore no blame for the tragedy, but the inquest commission decided he had obstructed the investigation with contradictory statements during his testimony. No criminal proceedings were recommended. Federal Regulation of Biologics Separating the serum, 1894 New York HeraldThe tragedy in St. Louis could have been a disaster for the future use of antitoxin, but the inquest clearly showed that the serum itself was not the culprit. Diphtheria remained a dreadful threat to children, and antitoxin was so far the only reliable treatment or preventative. To preserve both safety and public confidence in antitoxins and vaccines, Congress passed the Biological Products Act of 1902, also known as the “Virus-Toxin Law.” The Act required federal licensing of facilities producing biologicals for interstate shipment, and established safety reviews and approvals before products could be released. Authority to enforce the Act was given to the Hygienic Laboratory of the Marine Hospital Service, which evolved into the National Institutes of Health in 1930. Horses as Heroes With new national standards for biologics, serum production expanded rapidly to fight not only diphtheria but a host of other diseases. The advances in treatment and immunization could not have happened without the quiet work of the horses who provided serum. They are largely forgotten now, but in their day, many became famous and widely adored for their contributions to health science. Even into the 1930s, only about half of the horses inoculated would produce antitoxin. Individual horses became heroes for their ability to reliably produce large amounts of potent serum. References Acosta, Anna M., et al. “Diphtheria.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/Pubs/pinkbook/downloads/dip.pdf (accessed July 2, 2021). Condran, Gretchen A. “Changing patterns of epidemic disease in New York City.” In Hives of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City, edited by David Rosner, 27–41. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press for the Museum of the City of New York, 1995. Hunt, Peter B. “The Evolution of Federal Regulation of Human Drugs in the United States: An Historical Essay.” American Journal of Law & Medicine 44. Park, William H. “The First Production of Diphtheria Antitoxin in the United States.” Canadian Public Health Journal 27, no. 3. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Report on the Vital and Social Statistics in the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890; Part I—Analysis and Rate Tables. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896. “All Eager for Anti-Toxine.” New York Herald. December 11, 1894. “Anti-Toxine Grows in Favor.” New York Herald. December 13, 1894. “Antitoxin Inquest.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat. November 3, 1901. “City Anti-Toxin Given to Babies Caused Deaths.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. October 30, 1901. “Coroner Will Make an Investigation.” St. Louis Republic. October 31, 1901. “Emma Mary Ernst is the Eleventh Tetanus Victim.” St. Louis Republic. November 5, 1901. “’I Propose to Fix the Responsibility Specifically.’ Mayor Wells at Tetanus Inquiry.” St Louis Republic. December 13, 1901. “Its Fund a Success.” New York Herald. December 1, 1895. “One Animal at Michigan Laboratory Credited with Saving 75 Human Lives.” Detroit Free Press. August 13, 1933. “Ravold’s Helper in Serum Work Tells New Story.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. November 30, 1901. “Remedy for Diphtheria.” New York Herald. January 2, 1895. “Veterinarian’s View of City’s Antitoxin.” St. Louis Republic. November 12, 1901. In History History Articles Oral History History of Immunology and Science Timeline Notable Members Nobel Laureates Lasker Awardees Distinguished Scientific Awards AAAS Fellows NAS Electees In Memoriam StoryBooth Past Presidents and Officers Past Presidents' Messages History Projects

On July 1, 1946 the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) opened its doors and occupied one floor of a small building in Atlanta. Its primary mission was simple yet highly challenging: prevent malaria from spreading across the nation. Armed with a budget of only $10 million and fewer than 400 employees, the agency’s early challenges included obtaining enough trucks, sprayers, and shovels necessary to wage war on mosquitoes. As the organization took root deep in the South, once known as the heart of the malaria zone, CDC Founder Dr. Joseph Mountin continued to advocate for public health issues and to push for CDC to extend its responsibilities to other communicable diseases. He was a visionary public health leader with high hopes for this small and, at that time, relatively insignificant branch of the Public Health Service.

 

In 1947, CDC made a token payment of $10 to Emory University for 15 acres of land on Clifton Road in Atlanta that now serves as CDC headquarters. The new institution expanded its focus to include all communicable diseases and to provide practical help to state health departments when requested. Although medical epidemiologists were scarce in those early years, disease surveillance became the cornerstone of CDC’s mission of service to the states and over time changed the practice of public health. There have been many significant accomplishments since CDC’s humble beginnings. The following highlights some of CDC’s important achievements for improving public health worldwide. Today, CDC is one of the major operating components of the Department of Health and Human Services and is recognized as the nation’s premiere health promotion, prevention, and preparedness agency.

Via Juan Lama

Search Try the new Search Beta! search Search metadata Search text contents Search TV news captions Search radio transcripts Search archived web sites Advanced Search GO share Share No_Favorite Favorite Filters 8,348 RESULTS Show Details SHOW DETAILS up-solid down-solid RELEVANCE VIEWS TITLE DATE ARCHIVED DATE PUBLISHED DATE REVIEWED DATE ADDED CREATOR SORT BY RELEVANCEVIEWSTITLEDATE ARCHIVEDCREATOR eye Title Date Archived Creator 311 311 Immunology Apr 30, 2007 04/07 Tong Ji Medical School of Hua Zhong Science and Technology University movies These files available in Real Media format only. Topics: medicine, immunology 9 9.0 Immunology May 26, 2021 05/21 Ellis Dwina audio Clinical and Community Pharmacy, 4th semester, Bandung Institute of Technology Topic: Podcast 706 706 Clinical Training in Immunology Apr 30, 2007 04/07 Tong Ji Medical School of Hua Zhong Science and Technology University movies These files available in Real Media format only. 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Peter Piot reveals the...

This paper examines the origins of aseptic surgery in the German-speaking countries. It interprets asepsis as the outcome of a mutual realignment of surgery and laboratory science. In that process, phenomena of surgical reality were being modelled and ...