Word: cohn
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Edwin Joseph Cohn, son of a wealthy Manhattan tobacco importer, had just finished his doctoral thesis when World War I drew him into the Army Sanitary Corps. There he was sidetracked on an unrewarding assignment: trying to find a substitute for bread. As soon as possible, Scientist Cohn returned to his beloved proteins, learned what others knew about them in Copenhagen and Cambridge, then settled at Harvard to find out what nobody else knew...
...Time to Retire. By the time he was 40, Edwin Cohn had an imposing reputation in the narrow circle of protein specialists, and nowhere else. Then his doctors told him to retire: his high blood pressure might kill him any day. Dr. Cohn simply dosed himself with palliative drugs and kept on working. His first great success so far as medicine was concerned came in 1927 when he extracted from liver the substance that controls pernicious anemia. It meant that patients could take medicine, instead of having to eat a pound or more of liver every...
When the clouds gathered for World War II, Cohn was again sidetracked, as he saw it, from his protein work. The armed forces wanted to be assured of a supply of blood plasma, and the Navy thought Cohn should try to get it from beef blood because human donors would never suffice. Cohn found beef blood unpromising, and started a neighborhood donor service from which the Red Cross learned a lot. So the armed forces used human plasma...
...Cohn, a perfectionist, this was grossly wasteful. Usually, only one or two components of plasma were needed for each case. So he set to work in his laboratory, separating blood fluid into its many fractions, and soon had a practical method for extracting serum albumin. This was less bulky than plasma, kept better, and was far more economical. But it was not good enough for Cohn...
Oncley would not necessarily have been appointed as the University Professor, a post chosen by the President and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. This position, also left vacant by Cohn's death last week, is separate from the duties in the laboratory...