Elizabeth O. King

Elizabeth Osborne King (born October 12, 1912 in Atlanta , † April 8, 1966 there ) was an American bacteriologist . From 1948 until her death, she worked at the Communicable Disease Center in the field of microbiological diagnostics and was the first to describe and discover the bacterial species Elizabethkingia meningoseptica and Kingella kingae, which were later named after her .

Life

Elizabeth O. King was born in Atlanta in 1912 and received a B.Sc. in Zoology from the University of Georgia in 1935 and an M.Sc. in Medical Technology from Emory University in 1938 . Her master's thesis at the Department of Bacteriology and Pathology was entitled The effect of new antimalarial drugs on avian malaria .

During World War II , she was an officer in the United States Army Medical Service in the bacteriology department at Fort Detrick Base in Frederick, Maryland . In 1948 she went to the Communicable Disease Center founded two years earlier , the forerunner of the later Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she initially worked in a laboratory for diphtheria and from 1951 until her death in the laboratory for general bacteriology.

Elizabeth O. King died in 1966 in her hometown of cancer . Her grave is in Oakland Cemetery .

Scientific work

The main focus of Elizabeth O. King's work was the systematics of gram-negative bacteria for diagnostic purposes, particularly in the case of bacterial meningitis and other infections in childhood. The bacterial genus Elizabethkingia with the type Elizabethkingia meningoseptica , which she originally described as Flavobacterium meningosepticum for the first time in 1959 , has been named after her since 2005 .

A bacterial species isolated from her in 1960 , which was initially called Moraxella kingii and was named Kingella kingae in 1976 as a type species of the genus Kingella , also bears her name. Due to the early death of Elizabeth O. King, the first description of Moraxella kingii was not made by herself, but in 1968 by Sverre Dick Henriksen and Kjell Bøvre from the University of Oslo , to whom she had sent corresponding isolates in 1960.

Commemoration

In memory of Elizabeth O. King, the southeast sub-association of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has been presenting the Elizabeth O. King Award since 1970 for significant contributions in the field of medical microbiology . The ASM has also been holding an Elizabeth O. King Lecture Series since 2015 .

Works (selection)

• Studies on a group of previously unclassified bacteria associated with meningitis in infants. In: American Journal of Clinical Pathology. 31 (3) / 1959. American Society of Clinical Pathologists, pp. 241–247, ISSN  0002-9173 (first description of Flavobacterium meningosepticum )
• Current Trends in Diagnostic Microbiology: The Identification of Unusual Pathogenic Gram Negative Bacteria. Atlanta 1967

literature

• Dedication - Elizabeth O. King. In: Robin S. Weyant: Identification of Unusual Pathogenic Gram-Negative Aerobic and Facultatively Anaerobic Bacteria. Second edition. Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore 1996, ISBN 0-68-300615-0 , pp. V-xi
• Death of Miss Elizabeth O. King. In: The Public Health Laboratory. 24/1966. Thompson Publications, p. 99, ISSN  0033-3522

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical information from Robin S. Weyant, Baltimore 1996 (see literature)
2. ^ Entry in the catalog of the library of Emory University (last accessed March 10, 2016)
3. ↑ List of prokaryotic names with standing in nomenclature: Genus Elizabethkingia (last accessed March 10, 2016)
4. ↑ List of prokaryotic names with standing in nomenclature: Genus Kingella (last accessed on March 10, 2016)
5. ↑ Sverre Dick Henriksen, Kjell Bøvre: Moraxella kingii sp. Nov., A haemolytic, saccharolytic species of the genus Moraxella. In: Journal of General Microbiology. 51 (3) / 1968. Society for General Microbiology, pp. 377-385, ISSN  0022-1287