Denis Parsons Burkitt

Denis Parsons Burkitt (born February 28, 1911 in Enniskillen , County Fermanagh , Northern Ireland , † March 23, 1993 in Gloucester , England) was a British-Northern Irish surgeon and tropical medicine . Burkitt is best known for the first description of the malignant lymphoma named after him (" Burkitt lymphoma ") and his (controversial) views on dietary fiber .

Life

Burkitt was born the son of an engineer in a Protestant Northern Irish family. He was deeply influenced religiously by the family . He spent his youth in Northern Ireland. At the age of eleven, there was a momentous accident when he was injured so badly in his right eye in an argument with schoolmates that he became permanently blind in that eye . After graduating from school, he first took up engineering studies at Trinity College in Dublin in 1929 . Possibly under the influence of his uncle, a tropical medicine doctor in Kenya , he soon switched to medicine and graduated in 1935. He began training as a surgeon at the Royal College of Surgeans in Edinburgh . His applications for a position in the British colonies were initially unsuccessful because they thought they had no use for a one-eyed surgeon. After the outbreak of World War II , however, every man was needed and Burkitt became a military doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps of the British Army and served in what was then British East Africa (Kenya, Uganda ) from 1943 to 1945 , where he rose to the rank of major .

In 1966 Burkitt left Africa and moved back to England. In 1972 he received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research and the Paul Ehrlich und Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize , in 1973 a Gairdner Foundation International Award , in 1982 the Charles S. Mott Prize , in 1992 the Buchanan Medal of the Royal Society and in 1993 the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science from the Franklin Institute . Since 1989 he has been a member of the Académie des Sciences .

Discovery of Burkitt's lymphoma in East Africa

African child with (untreated) Burkitt's lymphoma in the lower jaw

After proving his operational capability during the war, he was accepted into British colonial service and initially worked as a doctor in Uganda from 1946. In 1957 he was introduced to a five-year-old boy who suffered from massive swelling of the face. In the period that followed, he kept seeing patients with these symptoms. The disease was characterized by a very rapid course and the patients (mostly children) died within a few days to weeks.

Realizing that it was a new type of tumor, Burkitt traveled with coworkers across East Africa to see more cases and to study the nature of the disease. Burkitt realized through his systematic investigations that the disease practically only occurred in climates in which malaria was also found. It turned out that the disease was malignant lymphoma, later called Burkitt's lymphoma .

Burkitt's research in East Africa did not initially meet with undue interest in Europe . In 1961, however, the English virologist Michael Anthony Epstein heard a lecture by Burkitt in London and then began to deal with Burkitt's lymphoma. In 1964, together with his colleagues Yvonne Barr and Bert G. Achong, he succeeded in isolating a new virus from a Burkitt lymphoma cell line , later called the Epstein-Barr virus .

Burkitt's fiber hypothesis

In the 1960s, Burkitt (along with Hugh Trowell) observed that Native Africans exhibited larger amounts of stool than Europeans, and attributed this to a higher amount of fiber in their diet . Burkitt believed that low-fiber foods caused diseases, especially cancer . His views led to the doctrine that fiber was generally beneficial to health. Even if this hypothesis was criticized in the following years, new study results do indeed show a health-promoting influence of dietary fiber, especially on cardiovascular diseases, obesity, type 2 diabetes and colorectal tumors.

Web links

• Short biography (English) at whonamedit

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ströhle, Alexander, Maike Wolters, and Andreas Hahn. "Preventive Potential of Dietary Fiber - Nutritional Physiology and Epidemiology." Current nutritional medicine 43.03 (2018): 179–200.