Medicine: Prize Week

Australia’s crisp Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, 61, is the ideal scientist: his curiosity continually leads him into new areas of study, and his determination usually keeps him in each long enough to come up with answers. Eleven years ago. when Burnet began to concentrate on the immunological intolerance of the human body —rejection by one body of invading material from another—he already was an authority on influenza, leukemia and viruses. His efforts in these fields won him a U.S. Lasker Award, appointment by Queen Elizabeth to Britain’s Order of Merit,* and a reputation so high, says one colleague, that “no discussion about any of the virus diseases known to man can be complete without mentioning his name.” Last week in Stockholm, Burnet’s work in immunology earned him medical science’s highest honor—the Nobel Prize.

No Marvel. Burnet shared his Nobel, worth $43,625, with towering (6 ft. 4½ in.) British Zoologist Peter Brian Medawar, who has been working on tissue transplants for the past 17 years. Experimenting with laboratory animals, Medawar was among the first to describe the mechanism of the puzzling “rejection reaction”—the process by which the human body develops antibodies similar to those it uses against viruses and bacteria to reject and destroy tissue transplants intended to replace diseased parts.

“The immunological defenses,” Dr. Medawar once remarked, “are dedicated to the proposition that anything foreign must be harmful, and this formula is ground out in a totally undiscriminating fashion with results that are sometimes irritating, sometimes harmful, and sometimes mortally harmful. It is far better to have immunological defenses than not to have them, but this does not mean that we are to marvel at them as evidences of a high and wise design.”

A Step Closer. Using the work of Medawar and others as a starting point, Australia’s Burnet theorized that the rejection reaction is not inherited full-blown, instead is developed gradually in the fetus and young child. Burnet speculated that if, during the period of immunological development, the human body could be taught to tolerate grafts from selected donors, it would later be able to accept tissue transplants from those same donors. Seizing on Burnet’s thesis. Dr. Medawar proceeded to confirm it in a series of laboratory tests. He inoculated mouse embryos in the womb with tissue from a different breed of mice, found that the inoculated animals later were able successfully to tolerate grafts from mice of the same breed as the original donors.

So far. the Burnet-Medawar discovery, hailed in the Nobel citation as “a new chapter in experimental biology,” has no direct medical use. But it represents a long step closer to the day dreamed of by many doctors when surgeons will be able to shift hearts, lungs, kidneys and even limbs from one body to another.

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Last week was prize week in the U.S. also. In New York the American Public Health Association and the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced winners of their 1960 Joint Awards in medical research. The recipients (who each received $2,500 and a Winged Victory statuette) included two scientists who are not medical researchers at all: German Engineer Ernst Ruska and U.S. Research Physicist James Hillier, who together are largely responsible for development of the electron microscope. Up to 500 times as powerful as the best optical microscope, the electron microscope has already given man his first look at viruses and promises to become one of medicine’s most useful tools. Says Physicist Hillier, 45: “The electron microscope is like the monkey wrench on the garage wall; what you do with it is the important thing.” Other Lasker Award winners:

¶ The U.S.’s James V. Neel and Britain’s Lionel S. Penrose, for genetic studies and research into the effects of ionizing radiation on humans.

¶ Britain’s Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick, and U.S. Biologist James D. Watson, for studies of the structure of the deoxyribonucleic (DNA) acid molecule, one of the principal elements in cell metabolism and in transmission of inheritable characteristics.

*Limited to 24 living persons. Among the present members: ex-Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, Poet T. S. Eliot.