Patrick Laidlaw

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Sir Patrick Playfair Laidlaw , often quoted by PP Laidlaw, (born September 26, 1881 in Glasgow , † March 19, 1940 in London ) was a British virologist , biochemist and pathologist .

Live and act

Laidlaw was the son of the Scottish doctor Robert Laidlaw, who was later in the missionary service, for example in the Seychelles . Through his mother, Elizabeth Playfair, he was related to the well-known British family of scientists and doctors Playfair. Laidlaw attended Leys School in Cambridge (where he had biology lessons from Henry Hallett Dale ) and studied at St John's College at Cambridge University (where he was particularly interested in biochemistry) and at Guy's Hospital in London, where he graduated with an MD in 1904 Did physiology and also worked for a short time as a physiology instructor. In 1909 he became an employee of Henry Dale Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories. In 1914 he became professor of pathology at St. Guy's Hospital. In 1922 he went to the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) to do virus research. There he was Deputy Director and Head of Experimental Pathology.

Laidlaw dealt with biochemical pathology. With Henry Hallett Dale in 1910 he recognized the role of histamine in allergic reactions. They found the effects of histamine similar to those of anaphylactic shock . At that time, his work on blood pigments ( heme ), which he carried out as a student , also received a lot of attention .

With veterinary surgeon George William Dunkin (1886–1942), he isolated the canine distemper virus , which they could transmit to ferrets, in 1923 , and Laidlaw's team developed a vaccine against it. They used ferrets as experimental animals, and these studies were also the starting point for the discovery of the influenza virus .

In 1933 he succeeded at the NIMR with Christopher Andrewes and Wilson Smith in isolating the human influenza virus that they could transmit to ferrets .

On the occasion of King George V's 70th birthday on June 3, 1935, Laidlaw was ennobled . He was in poor health all his life, having developed polio as a child . He died of a heart attack while he was only 59 years old.

He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (1934) and the Royal Society (1927). In 1933 he received their Royal Medal . Shortly before his death, he became an Honorary Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. In 1938 he was a speech lecturer at Cambridge ( Virus diseases and Viruses ).

source

  • Martin Edwards: Control and the Therapeutic Trial. Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain 1918-1948 (Clio Medica Series). Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam 2007, p. 123, ISBN 978-90-420-2273-7 .
  • Obituary in Biomedical Journal , Volume 34 (1940)
  • Obituary in Journal of Pathology , Volume 51 (1941), p. 145, ISSN  0022-3417

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sometimes March 20th is also given
  2. ^ Arthur George Tansley : Charles Glass Playfair Laidlaw (pdf). In: New Phytologist , Vol. 14 (1915), No. 6/7, pp. 210-211, ISSN  0028-646X (obituary for the brother of PP Laidlaw, born in 1887, who was a botanist and died in the First World War)
  3. ↑ Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke , Christoph Friedrich : History of Pharmacy, Vol. 2: From the early modern times to the present . Govi Verlag, Eschborn 2005, p. 485, ISBN 3-7741-1027-1 .
  4. ^ PP Laidlaw: Some observations on blood pigments . In: The Journal of Physiology , Vol. 31 (1904), pp. 464-472, ISSN  0022-3751
  5. ↑ Andrew W. Artenstein: Influenza . In the S. (Ed.): Vaccines. A biography . Springer, New York 2010, p. 193, ISBN 978-1-4419-1107-0 .
  6. ↑ Named after the lawyer Robert Rede († 1519)
personal data
SURNAME Laidlaw, Patrick
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Laidlaw, Patrick Playfair (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British virologist, biochemist and pathologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Glasgow
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1940
Place of death London