Cyril Leslie Oakley

Signature of Oakley

Cyril Leslie Oakley ( MBE ; born June 20, 1907 in London , † March 27, 1975 ) was a British pathologist and bacteriologist . At Wellcome Research Laboratories , he earned an international reputation in the field of immunology .

Life and education

Cyril was the older of two children of the merchant navy - Officer George Oakley and his wife Henriette Ellen. He was born in Lambeth Hospital. Shortly after he was born, the family moved to Portsmouth , where he attended the Church of England School, with which he would remain lifelong. Cyril was nine years old when his father was killed while exercising in a submarine . His mother then had to get by with smaller odd jobs because the father had not yet built up any great pension entitlements. They moved back to Balham in urban London. During this time, Cyril began to read a lot because he was on his own. His maternal grandmother recognized his abilities for an academic career and in 1918 arranged a scholarship to the Westminster City School of the London County Council , where he stayed for seven years.

When he graduated from school in 1925, he won a Kitchener scholarship to University College London, where he began studying medicine . At the same time he began evening studies at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and published his own studies on copepods . In 1930 he completed his medical and zoology studies with honors.

Research and Teaching

He then received the Graham four-year fellowship in experimental pathology at University College Hospital , where he worked intensively with Arthur Edwin Boycott (1877-1938, member of the Royal Society since 1914 ) and Gordon Roy Cameron (1899-1966, member since 1946) in the field of the liver pathology. This topic was also the subject of his habilitation in 1934.

That same year, Oakley moved to the veterinary department of Wellcome Research Laboratories , where he worked on research into lymphatic cancer . Through this activity his attention was drawn to the issue of viral infections and he began working on canine distemper a year later . He was fascinated by the model of the immune system , a science that was still in its infancy, and in 1937 proposed a thesis describing the response of antibodies to the inhalation of viruses in mice.

After this experience in virology, Oakley turned back to the subject of bacteriology with the study of Clostridia . At the Institute we had a large collection of bacteria that could help the gangrene to explore better. This topic came into focus because the danger of another world war was to be feared. He was supported by scientists such as Mollie Barr , Ethel Bidwell , Patricia Clarke (1919–2010) and Helen Ross . After he was involved in some publications of the department in the first years of the war, his first own essay appeared in 1943 with the topic "The toxins of Clostridiunz welchii ", which together with other successful articles consolidated his position as a leading researcher in this field of bacteriology. In 1943 his only popular scientific study appeared: "He-goats into young men: first steps in statistics". In it, he deals with a test method of the so-called pure-in-heart index ( German : pure heart index ) as a statistical feature. No further research was carried out on this. The investigation goes back to the 1932 witch experiment carried out by Harry Price .  

After the war, he worked with Francis Brambell (1901–1970) on the transmission of antibodies from the mother to her young. From 1949 he researched the development of antibodies and the determination of their proportion in tissue after the transplantation of lymph nodes. Soon after, Oakley and AJ Fulthorpe developed the method of double diffusion in one dimension for the analysis of heterogeneous antigen-antibody systems, which was published in 1953 and went into science under the name Oakley-Fulthorpe technique .

In 1952, Oakley was appointed professor of bacteriology at Leeds University, where he took up his position in April 1953. In the same year he also became Professor Sc. from the University of London and elected to the Royal Society in 1957. In Leeds, he was responsible for a large diagnostic bacteriology hospital and for teaching bacteriology to medical and scientific students. Over time, his activities both in the university and in teaching in the hospital have diversified, including in the affairs of various scientific societies and as an author. Oakley motivated young scientists to research neurological and bacterial diseases and he worked actively with the Tetanus Treatment Center in the Leeds General Infirmary . He also conducted research for the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and the Medical Science Committee . He is also a co-founder of the Royal College of Pathologists . In 1970 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire .

Non-professional interests

In addition to his outstanding professional achievements, Oakley had an omnipresent interest in all fields of science. He also had a phenomenal memory and profound language skills in Greek and Latin as well as Chinese in writing and language. He was also able to speak fluently in French and German. He was also interested in religious studies , eclecticism in architecture and iconography, which he also taught at the University of Leeds. He also gave statistics lectures and at the end of his life also became an expert in science fiction .

In 1956 Oakley replaced Matthew Stewart as editor-in-chief at the Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology, who had succeeded Arthur Edwin Boycott in 1934, and ran the paper until 1973. Since 1979, the paper has been an annual Oakley scholar.

Works (selection)

• The Chondracanthidae (Crustacea: Copepoda) with a description of five new genera and one new species. Parasitology, 22, 182., 1930.
• On the nature of pseudotubules in diseases of the human liver. Zentralblatt general path. Anatomie, 58, 81., 1933.
• Frozen sections of eyes. J. Path. Bnct., 44, 365, 1937.
• Chorio-allantoic grafts of liver. J. Path. Bact., 46, 109, 1938.
• Chemotherapy of virus infections. Brit. med. J., 1, 895, 1938.
• et al .: The kappa and lambda antigens of Clostridium welchii. J. Path. Bact., 60, 495, 1948.
• et al .: Selective and non-selective admission of various antitoxins into fetal rabbits. Proc. R. Soc. B., 139, 567, 1952.
• et al .: Antibody production in transplants. J. toxins by the fetal membranes of rabbits. Proc. R. Soc. B., 142, 452, 1954.
• Bacterial toxins and classification. J. gen. Microbiol., 12, 344, 1955.
• Soluble bacterial antigens as discriminants in classification. In: GC Ainsworth, PHA Sneath (Ed.): Microbial classification, Symp. SOC. gen. Microbiol. No. 12, London 1962, p. 242.
• Classification of the genus Clostridium. Bull. Of. int. Epiz., 59, 1411, 1963.
• et al .: Relative Toxicities and Assay Systems. and Immunology of bacterial protein toxins. In: SJ Ajl, S. Kadis and TC Montie (eds.): Microbial toxins. Volume 1, New York 1970.

literature

• DG Evans: Cyril Leslie Oakley. June 20, 1907 - March 27, 1975. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 22, 1976, pp. 295-305, doi : 10.1098 / rsbm.1976.0012 .
• Obituary Notice: Cyril Leslie Oakley. In: The Journal of Medical Microbiology 9, pp. 121–127, PMID 778388 , doi : 10.1099 / 00222615-9-2-121 (with portrait and list of publications)

Web links

Obituary . In: Nature 1975 Vol. 254, p. 640

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Published by: British Chemical and Physiological Abstracts , Bureau of Chemical and Physiological Abstracts, Chemical Society, Society of Chemical Industry (Great Britain), 1938, p. 512
2. ↑ David Colquhoun: Lectures on Biostatistics: An Introduction to Statistics with Application in Biology and Medicine , 1971, p. 111
3. ↑ Irving Finger and Elvin A. Kabat : A comparison of human antisera to purified diphtheria toxoid with antisera to other purified antigens by quantitative precipitin and gel diffusion techniques. In: The Journal of experimental medicine. Volume 108, Number 4, October 1958, pp. 453-474, ISSN  0022-1007 . PMID 13575678 . PMC 2136900 (free full text).
4. ^ History of the sheet , p. 99ff
5. ^ Archives of the Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology
6. ↑ Oakley Scholarship Winner (PDF; 96 kB)