Word: interferon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lindenmann decided to call the mysterious stuff interferon, a hybrid of "interference" and the suffix "on," which was in vogue among biologists, who were using such names as cistron, recon and muton to describe new genetic concepts. The initial discovery was made in November and duly recorded in Isaacs' lab notebook under the entry: "In search of an interferon." Lindenmann took it all in stride. Said he: "I thought it quite natural that when you did research you discovered things...
...seemed, was an agent that would mow down a broad spectrum of viruses, just as penicillin does with bacteria. Most laymen remained unaware of the discovery, but one notable exception was Dan Barry, artist of the Flash Gordon comic strip. That became evident when the first clinical use of interferon took place not in a hospital but in a 1960 Flash Gordon adventure. In that episode, spacemen infected with an extraterrestrial virus aboard a rocket ship far from home are pulled back from death's door by last-minute injections of interferon...
...many scientists had their doubts, one of them disdainfully calling the finding "misinterpreton." Recalls Microbiologist Samuel Baron, who worked with Isaacs in 1960: "It was too good to believe. Other inhibitors of viruses had been debunked, so they thought interferon was another false claim." Baron, from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, had his own doubts when he arrived in England to join Isaacs: "I remember saying to the technician, 'Let's see how this thing works.' It was so impressive that at the end of a week I was fully convinced of its potential. I rolled...
Baron was one of the few to persevere. He and other interferon researchers had little to go on, for there was practically no interferon available to be studied. The chemical is produced only in minute quantities in living cells, and extracting it proved difficult and costly, liabilities that are only now beginning to be overcome. Also, though all vertebrate animals produce IF, it seems to be species specific, meaning that it works only in the type of animal that produces it. Monkey interferon works only in monkeys, mouse in mice and human in humans. Thus, unlike the insulin extracted from...
Throughout most of the 1960s, a handful of interferon enthusiasts continued working with only the tiniest amounts of material, gradually unlocking interferon's secrets. They found that it is a protein produced by cells in response to some stimulation, usually by a virus. To date, at least three varieties of IF have been identified. One kind is produced by leukocytes, or white blood cells. A second type is generated by fibroblasts, cells that form connective tissue in skin and other organs. (A prime source of fibroblast IF is the foreskin of circumcised infants.) The third, called immune interferon, is apparently...