Alick Isaacs

Alick Isaacs (born  July 17, 1921 in Glasgow , †  January 26, 1967 in London ) was a British virologist and immunologist . From 1950 he worked at the National Institute for Medical Research , where he headed the WHO Influenza Center and from 1961 to 1964 the Department of Bacteriology and Virus Research. His scientific interest was in particular infections with influenza viruses . As part of these studies, he and the Swiss Jean Lindenmann discovered the substance interferon and thus the first cytokine in 1957 .

Life

Alick Isaacs was born in Glasgow in 1921 as the eldest of four children to parents of Jewish origin and studied medicine at the university there from 1939 to 1944 . After a year at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, he moved to the University's Department of Bacteriology as a research assistant , where he worked from 1945 to 1947. Then he went with a scholarship of the Medical Research Council (MRC) to the University of Sheffield , where he is of Virology and in particular studies on influenza viruses turned. In addition, he met his wife during his time in Sheffield, with whom he was married from 1949 and later had three children.

With a Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship and later with renewed support from the MRC, he spent two years from 1948 at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne with the later Nobel Prize winner Frank Macfarlane Burnet . He returned to his home country in 1950 and took over the management of the WHO Influenza Center at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in London . Five years later he received his PhD with Honors from the University of Glasgow. From 1961 to 1964 he was director of the NIMR department for bacteriology and virus research, after which he headed his own research laboratory there. He died in London in 1967 at the age of 45 as a result of subarachnoid hemorrhage .

Scientific work

Alick Isaacs published more than 110 scientific publications during his career and was mainly concerned with studies on influenza viruses. Together with the Swiss scientist Jean Lindenmann , he discovered the body's own substance interferon in virus-infected cell cultures in 1957 . This was the first known representative of the substance class of cytokines , which control the growth and differentiation of cells and are therefore of central importance for the regulation of the immune response and hematopoiesis, among other things . This discovery, which profoundly influenced both immunological and virological research in the subsequent period, is considered to be one of the most important breakthroughs in biomedical sciences of the 1950s. After the discovery of interferon, Alick Isaacs mainly devoted himself to researching its role in the defense against viral infections . Further of his work concerned the epidemiology of infections with different influenza strains.

Awards

Alick Isaacs received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Leuven in 1962 . Four years later he was inducted into the Royal Society .

literature

• Christopher H. Andrewes: Alick Isaacs. 1921-1967. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 13/1967. The Royal Society, pp. 205-221, ISSN  0080-4606
• Obituary notices. A. Isaacs, MD, FRS In: British Medical Journal . Issue 5536 of February 4, 1967, p. 305
• Charles Herbert Stuart-Harris: Obituaries. Dr. Alick Isaacs. In: Nature . Volume 213, issue 5076, issue of February 11, 1967, p. 555