Peter Alfred Gorer

Peter Alfred Gorer (born  April 14, 1907 in London , †  May 11, 1961 ibid) was a British pathologist , immunologist and geneticist . He worked from 1934 to 1940 at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and then at Guy's Hospital , where he was a lecturer in experimental pathology from 1947. His scientific achievements include the discovery of the H-2 antigens in mice . For this reason, he is considered one of the leading immunologists of his time and one of the founders of immunogenetics .

Life

Peter Gorer was born in London in 1907 . His father, an art dealer and expert on Chinese porcelain , died in 1915 when the RMS Lusitania was sunk ; his older brother Geoffrey Edgar Gorer (1905–1985) worked as a social anthropologist . In September 1924 he began studying dentistry at Guy's Hospital in his hometown , but switched to medicine three months later . He obtained a B.Sc. in Physiology in 1929 and completed his clinical training three years later. After a subsequent stay at University College London , where he worked with JBS Haldane in particular with genetics , he went to the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London in 1934 , where he stayed until 1940.

In the same year he returned to Guy's Hospital, where he worked as a hematologist and pathologist during the Second World War and rarely did research during this time. After the end of the war, he spent a year in the USA at the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor in 1946/1947 on a scholarship from the National Institutes of Health , where he worked with the future Nobel Prize winner George Davis Snell , among others . On his return to England, he was appointed Professor of Experimental Pathology at Guy's Hospital.

Peter Gorer was married for the first time in 1942, but his wife died of tuberculosis in May 1945 . During his time in Bar Harbor, he met his second wife, with whom he was married from 1947 and had a son and a daughter. He died in 1961 at the age of 54 in his hometown of complications from cancer-related pulmonary edema and no longer saw the establishment of a professorship in immunology at Guy's Hospital, for which he was intended as the first holder.

Scientific work

Peter Gorer, who published around 50 scientific publications , devoted himself in particular to immunogenetics and the immunological aspects of transplants . In trials for the transplantation of tumors in mice , he discovered the H-2 antigens that influenced the response of different mouse strains on transplanted tumors, and thus the first major histocompatibility complex ( Major histocompatibility complex , MHC). In addition, he investigated genetic variations in the susceptibility of mice to bacterial infections .

Awards

Peter Gorer was admitted to the Royal Society in 1960 and posthumously received the first ever William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology in 1975 as one of 16 scientists honored as the founders of cancer immunology . The Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology at King's College London bears his name in memory of him.

literature

• Peter Brian Medawar : Peter Alfred Gorer. 1907-1961. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 7/1961. The Royal Society, pp. 95-105, ISSN  0080-4606
• Peter Alfred Gorer. 1907-1961. In: Leslie Brent: A History of Transplantation Immunology. Academic Press, San Diego and London 1997, ISBN 0-12-131770-6 , pp. 176/177
• Obituary: Peter Alfred Gorer. In: The Lancet . Volume 277, edition 7186 of May 20, 1961, pp. 1120/1121
• It started in the Mouse: Discovery of Histocompatibility Antigen II and the H-2 Complex. In: Narinder K. Mehra: The HLA Complex in Biology and Medicine: A Resource Book. Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers, New Delhi 2010, ISBN 8-18-448870-X , p. 43