Adrian Stokes (medic)

Adrian Stokes (born February 9, 1887 in Lausanne , † September 19, 1927 in Lagos ) was an Irish-British bacteriologist who demonstrated the transferability of the yellow fever virus to monkeys, which formed the basis for the later vaccine development by Max Theiler .

Stokes came from a well-known family of doctors in Dublin, his grandfather being the doctor William Stokes . His father Henry John Stokes was an administrator in the Indian Civil Service. Stokes studied medicine from 1905 at Trinity College in Dublin with an MD degree in 1911. During World War I he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and received the DSO . In 1919 he became professor of bacteriology in Dublin and in 1922 professor of pathology at Guy's Hospital in London. In 1920 he visited Lagos to test a hypothesis by the Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi that yellow fever was caused by a bacterium ( Leptospira icteroides ), which was refuted by Stokes himself and Max Theiler. On a second visit to Lagos he achieved a scientific breakthrough - he showed that the yellow fever virus could be transmitted to rhesus monkeys, which could then serve as test animals for vaccine development. He also succeeded in proving that the Leptospira bacteria were not also transmitted during yellow fever transmission between monkeys , which means that they are eliminated as pathogens. During the experiments, however, he contracted yellow fever himself and died of the infection (as did Noguchi a year later in West Africa when he wanted to test his hypothesis).

Works

• Together with John Alfred Ryle and WH Tytler. Weil's disease (Spirochaetosis ictero-haemorrhagica) in the British Army in Flanders . In: The Lancet , January 27, 1917 (digitized version)

literature

• John Daintith Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists , CRC Press 2009
• JG Frierson: The yellow fever vaccine: a history. In: The Yale journal of biology and medicine. Volume 83, Number 2, June 2010, pp. 77-85, PMID 20589188 , PMC 2892770 (free full text).