Word: gofman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Across the bay in Berkeley, at U. of C.'s Donner Laboratory, Dr. John Gofman is the nation's outstanding worker with cholesterol and the substances with which it combines in the body. Researcher Gofman and his colleagues examined the combinations in which cholesterol circulates. It enters the bloodstream combined with proteins of different kinds. Cholesterol molecules in the combinations known as alpha-lipoproteins are generally of high density and seem relatively little involved in disease; the beta-lipoproteins contain the fat and flabby cholesterol molecule that is clearly implicated in atherosclerosis...
...taking blood samples from volunteers at regular intervals and analyzing their lipoproteins, Dr. Gofman is now convinced that he has enough experience to forecast whether a given individual will suffer from atherosclerosis. (Other researchers are not sure that he is right. Three laboratories-at Harvard, the University of Pittsburgh and the Cleveland Clinic-have been running experiments to prove or disprove the Gofman thesis.) Still to be explored is the possibility that a more fundamental mechanism is involved: a defect in body chemistry-the way in which an individual metabolizes either fats or proteins...
...opposite sides of San Francisco Bay, two teams of University of California researchers hold different theories about the cause of hardening of the arteries. On the east side, in the Berkeley campus' Donner Laboratory, Dr. John Gofman leans to the theory that giant cholesterol molecules are to blame (TIME, June 5, 1950). Now, from the University's School of Medicine on the west side, comes strong evidence to the contrary. Cholesterol, according to Drs. Henry D. Moon and James F. Rinehart, does not cause hardening of the arteries, and is not even much of a factor until...
...Gofman is not impressed. "I still think the lipid [fat] process comes first," he says. "If at any. given time you look at an artery that has been damaged by arteriosclerosis and find no signs of lipid substance, the tendency is to conclude that no lipid has existed. But there is strong evidence for believing that the lipid may have come first, starting the process, and then disappeared...
Scarcely less remarkable than the technical achievements of the California researchers is the career of the 31-year-old man who reported them. When Gofman got his Ph.D. in 1943 he was already the co-discoverer of uranium 233. one of the radioactive isotopes used in research which led to the atomic bomb. After leaving the Manhattan Project. Dr. Gofman went to medical school and in 1946 got his M.D. He is now an assistant professor of medical physics at Donner Laboratory in Berkeley, and senior member of the large team which has been probing the molecular make...