Porter W. Anderson Jr.

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Porter Warren Anderson, Jr. (born January 1, 1937 in Corinth , Mississippi ) is an American microbiologist . He was best known for developing a vaccine to protect children against Haemophilus influenzae b infection , one of the most serious bacterial infections in the first five years of life. Anderson is a member of the American Society for Microbiology and the National Academy of Sciences .

Life

Porter W. Anderson was born in Corinth , Mississippi on January 1, 1937 , the first son of Porter Warren Anderson Sr. and Mary Rogers Anderson. After the family moved for professional reasons, Anderson grew up near Montgomery , Alabama , from the age of about three months , where his sister Sarah was born in 1941.

After graduating from Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery in 1954, Anderson received a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry from Emory University in Atlanta , Georgia in 1958 . In 1961 he graduated from Harvard University and received a Master of Arts in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1967. in bacteriology . From 1966 to 1968, Anderson taught at Stillman College , a historic African American college in Tuscaloosa .

At the Children's Hospital in Boston, Anderson began in 1968, together with David H. Smith and Richard Insel, to research a vaccine against Hib infections, which among other things cause meningitis and epiglottitis in children . Since animal experiments with their first vaccine, a purified polysaccharide , yielded no results, Anderson and colleagues tested the vaccines on themselves. The vaccine was approved for medical use in 1986. Clinical studies in Finland then showed the vaccine was effective in children but not in infants. After moving to the University of Rochester , the research team also developed an infant vaccine, which became a staple of standard childhood immunizations in 1990, reducing Hib disease by 99%. Anderson and Smith received the 1996 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research for their achievements . Anderson was also awarded the Prince Mahidol Prize for 2017 .

The website scienceheroes.com lists Anderson, with over 660,000 lives saved, as 91st of the people who saved the most lives in the world.

Anderson holds a total of nine patents and three pending patent applications. He owns a house in Key Largo , Florida , but also spends a lot of time in Boston.

literature

  • David Pearson: The Problem Solver. Emory Magazine (Spring 2011), Vol. 87, No. 1, pp. 18–21 ( PDF ; on emory.edu )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Porter W. Anderson, Jr. ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website of the American Society for Microbiology @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / academy.asm.org
  2. ↑ Porter W. Anderson, Jr. on the National Academy of Sciences website
  3. ↑ Porter W. Anderson on scienceheroes.com
personal data
SURNAME Anderson, Porter W. Junior
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Anderson, Porter Warren Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American microbiologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Corinth , Mississippi