Robert Austrian

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Robert Austrian (born April 12, 1916 in Baltimore , † March 25, 2007 in Philadelphia ) was an American bacteriologist , immunologist and physician.

Life

Austrian, whose father was a medical professor at Johns Hopkins University , studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University (bachelor's degree 1937, MD 1941) and was there from 1943 to 1947 instructor, interrupted from military service as a doctor in the US Army in China, India and Burma (from 1944 until the end of the war). 1947/48 he was research assistant in microbiology at New York University and from 1949 to 1952 again instructor at Johns Hopkins. In 1952 he became an associate professor and then professor at the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center. In 1960/61 he was a visiting scientist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. From 1962 to 1986 he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and head of the medical research department. He was then director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Reference and Research.

He was an expert on pneumococcal infections and is known for developing a vaccine against pneumococci , the bacterial infection that causes severe pneumonia , among other things . He began his work when it was widely believed in the United States in the 1960s that antibiotics actually made the development of such a vaccine superfluous. However, epidemiological studies by Austrian during this time showed that the number of deaths from pneumococcal infections in the USA was still half as high as at the beginning of the century and that patients over 50 years of age and those with chronic illnesses and previous exposures, for example from alcoholism, were particularly at risk (Particularly severe cases of simultaneous meningitis , pneumonia and endocarditis were given the name Austrian Syndrome ). Austrian examined exactly which strains were primarily responsible for the infections (14 of 83 strains known at the time) and developed a successful vaccine based on the polysaccharide capsules of these strains.

The vaccine (A 14) was licensed by MSD and introduced in 1977. In 1983, an improved vaccine (responding to 23 strains) replaced the old one.

In 1978 he received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award . He was a four-time honorary doctor . In 1971 he was President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America , received its Bristol Award in 1986 and gave its Maxwell Finland Plenary Lecture in 1974. In 2001 he received the Maxwell Finland Award from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and, since 1987, the American Philosophical Society . The auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania's Clinical Research Building is named after him.

He was married to Babette Friedman for 37 years, who died in 2000.

Fonts

  • Life with the Pneumococcus. Notes from the Bedside, Laboratory, and Library, University of Pennsylvania Press 1985

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career dates Pamela Kalte u. a., American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Colin MacLeod and the ER Squibb company gave the first vaccine in the USA immediately after the Second World War , but interest quickly lost interest in it after the advent of antibiotics
  3. ^ R. Austrian, J. Gold: Pneumococcal bacteremia with special reference to bacteremic pneumococcal pneumonia . In: Annals of Internal Medicine . tape 60 , May 1964, p. 759-776 , doi : 10.7326 / 0003-4819-60-5-759 , PMID 14156606 .
  4. ↑ a b Jerome O. Klein and Stanley A. Plotkin: Robert Austrian: 1917–2007 . In: Clinical Infectious Diseases . tape 45 , no. 1 , July 1, 2007, p. 2-3 , doi : 10.1086 / 520068 .
personal data
SURNAME Austrian, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American medic
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 2007
Place of death Philadelphia