Herald Cox

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Herald Cox at the microscope, RML, 1938

Herald Rea Cox (born February 28, 1907 in Rosedale , Indiana , † August 17, 1986 in Hamilton , Montana ) was an American microbiologist. From the late 1940s he was one of the developers of the oral vaccination against polio . The family of bacteria Coxiellaceae is named after him.

Life

Herald Cox grew up in Rosedale and moved with his family to Terre Haute in 1917 , where his father Leo Cox had opened a car repair shop. Herald Cox attended Garfield High School there until 1924 and then studied biology at Indiana State Normal School . After his bachelor's degree in 1928, Cox went to Baltimore to the Johns Hopkins University , where he received his Sc.D. from the immunologist Roscoe R. Hyde (1884–1943). received his doctorate.

After receiving his doctorate, he initially taught at Johns Hopkins University and then went to New York City to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research . There he worked, among other things, on vaccines against Western equine encephalomyelitis .

In 1936, the US Public Health Service sent Cox to Rocky Mountain Labs (RML) in Hamilton, Montana, to develop therapies for tick-borne Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF). The mortality rate for this disease caused by the bacterium Rickettsia rickettsii was 90% at the time. Until 1941, Cox worked there to develop a safe vaccine. In the course of his work, new methods of cultivating rickettsiae and viruses in the yolk sacs of chicken embryos also emerged.

Cox was also involved in research into Q fever at the RML . The disease was first described in 1935 by Edward Holbrook Derrick (1898–1976) in Brisbane , Australia; the researchers Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Mavis Freeman , who also worked in Brisbane, isolated the pathogen from sick patients in 1937. In 1938 at the RML, Cox and his colleague Gordon Davis (1889–1977) succeeded in discovering how the disease was transmitted, isolating the pathogen from ticks, and developing a vaccine. The name suggested by Cox and Davis for the bacterium was Rickettsia diaporica ; the name Coxiella burnetii after Cox (and Burnet) was first proposed in 1943 by Cox's colleague Cornelius B. Philip (1900-1987) after it had been found that there was no closer relationship with Rickettsia rickettsii . In 2005, the Coxiellaceae family containing the bacterium was also named after Cox.

While at the RML, Cox developed a typhoid vaccine that was widely used by American troops during World War II .

In 1942, Cox accepted an offer from the American Cyanamid Company and went back to New York to work for the next 26 years as director of virus and rickettsial research at Lederle Laboratories in Pearl River . At Lederle, Cox developed, among other things, an improved rabies vaccine for dogs.

His most important success at Lederle Laboratories was when Cox headed the virus research team that worked on a live polio vaccine for 16 years . Hilary Koprowski , to whom the work initially owed decisive impulses , also belonged to his team . However, there was a falling out between Cox and Koprowski because he had carried out the first clinical tests of the polio vaccine from attenuated pathogens in early 1950 without the knowledge of Cox; Koprowski left the Lederle research team in 1957.

Although the Cox team had developed the first effective polio vaccine , it was no longer possible to develop the product to market readiness: an intramuscularly injected dead vaccine made from polioviruses killed with formaldehyde, developed by Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh , was already in 1954 in tested in large series and approved in 1955. In parallel, Albert Sabin was working on a competing live vaccine at the University of Cincinnati . As Sabin's vaccine, which was only found to be less effective after approval, was now considered established, Sabin resorted to an offer from the Soviet Union to carry out the clinical trials . There, his vaccine was further developed under the direction of Mikhail Tschumakow (1909-1993) and tested in clinical studies in 1958/59; Immediately afterwards, the widespread use of oral vaccination began in the Soviet Union and the allied states. At the same time, in the USA and Western Europe, due to the continued medical (administration of living virus material) and now also ideological (development in the Soviet Union) reservations, the primary focus was still on the Salk injections. Oral vaccination according to Cox was also used at least occasionally, for example in West Berlin in mid-1960 , where the penetration of weakened polioviruses from East Berlin , which was already heavily vaccinated, was feared, but the Eastern Bloc vaccine was not wanted.

Due to the success rate of the Sabin-Chumakov oral vaccination, which cannot be ignored, the US Public Health Service finally recommended the virus strains developed by Sabin for oral vaccination in August 1960, and this vaccine was used worldwide in the following years. This also meant the end of the independent development of the Cox oral vaccination; In 1963 Lederle himself brought a trivalent oral vaccine with the three Sabin strains on the market under the name Orimune , which became the most widely used polio vaccine in the USA.

In 1961, Cox was elected President of the American Society for Microbiology for one year .

Cox became director of cancer research at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute (RPMI) in 1968 and retired in 1972 in Hamilton, Montana.

From 1932 until his death he was married to Marion Curry (1910–1990). The couple had a daughter and two sons.

Honors

swell

  • Sue Loughlin: Rosedale native remembered for combating polio . In: Tribune-Star , Terre Haute, August 25, 1986, p. A3.
  • Tribute: Herald Rea Cox . In: Tribune-Star , Terre Haute, October 17, 1996.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ From the shot glass . In: Der Spiegel , July 19, 1961
  2. ↑ https://www.asm.org/index.php/membership/71-membership/archives/913-presidents-of-the-society
personal data
SURNAME Cox, Herald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cox, Herald Rea; Cox, HR
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American microbiologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 28, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Rosedale (Indiana)
DATE OF DEATH 17th August 1986
Place of death Hamilton (Montana)