William Trager
William Trager (born March 20, 1910 in Newark , New Jersey , † January 22, 2005 in New York City ) was an American parasitologist , known for research on malaria .
Life
Youth and education
Trager, who already collected insects in his youth, studied zoology at Rutgers University (Bachelor 1930) and received his doctorate in 1933 with LR Cleveland at Harvard University with a thesis on the symbiotic unicellular organisms in the intestines of termites. He then went to the Laboratory for Zoological Pathology (Animal Pathology) at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton . From 1934 he was a permanent part of the institute (from 1953 Rockefeller University) and stayed there for the rest of his career. He was a professor there, from 1980 professor emeritus, but remained scientifically active until shortly before his death.
Research areas
Trager was very adept at dealing with various parasites in the laboratory. In the 1930s he built a pathogen-free rearing system in the laboratory to study the larva of the yellow fever mosquito ( Stegomyia aegypti , formerly Aedes aegypti ) and he developed cultures of mosquito and silkworm tissue for in vitro studies. In the 1970s he succeeded in reproducing trypanosomes , the pathogen causing sleeping sickness , in cell cultures from tsetse flies .
He also dealt with ticks, another major source of infection besides mosquitoes, and showed that there is immunization against ticks in vertebrates, so that in principle farm animals can be vaccinated.
In the 1970s he achieved a breakthrough in the cultivation of the malaria pathogen Plasmodium falciparum in human blood in the laboratory, which is important for the targeted development of drugs and vaccines. He dealt with malaria as early as World War II when he tested antimalarial drugs (atabrine) as a captain in the US Army (Sanitary Corps) in Northern Australia. In 1950 he succeeded in breeding a malaria pathogen that infected birds. He also showed that parasites were dependent on vital cofactors of the host cell for their metabolism , in particular he demonstrated this using the example of biotin .
Editor and consultant
From 1953 to 1965 he was the founding editor of the Journal of Protozoology (now Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology). In 1960/61 he was President of the Society of Protozoologists, 1973/74 of the American Society of Parasitologists and 1978/79 of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. He was an advisor to WHO and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases .
Fellowships and honors
In 1973 he was accepted into the National Academy of Sciences . In 1973/74 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. He received honorary degrees from Rutgers University (1965) and Rockefeller University (1987). In 1980 he received the S. T. Darling Medal for malaria from the WHO, in 1982 the Leuckart Medal of the German Society for Parasitology, in 1986 the Manson Medal of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and in 1991 the Augustine Le Prince Medal the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and the Prince Mahidol Prize in 1994 .
In 1998 the Society for Protozoology endowed the William Trager Award.
Private life
He had been married to Ida Sosnow since 1935 and had two daughters and a son.
Fonts
- Symbiosis , Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York 1970
- Living together - the biology of animal parasitism , Plenum Press, New York 1986
- Edited with John Gardiola, Lucio Luzzatto: The molecular biology of parasites , Raven Press, New York 1983
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Trager, JB Jensen: Human malaria parasites in continuous culture , Science, Volume 193, 1976, pp. 673-675
- ^ Trager: The influence of Biotin upon the susceptibility of Malaria , Science, Volume 97, 1943, p. 206
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Trager, William |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American parasitologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 20, 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Newark , New Jersey |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 22, 2005 |
| Place of death | New York City |