Word: lancefield
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DIED. Rebecca C. Lancefield, 86, bacteriologist, who in 1928 was the first to identify which streptococci are chiefly responsible for causing human disease, and systematically went on to categorize more than 60 different types, including those that cause strep throat, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever and glomerulonephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys; in New York City. Lancefield joined Manhattan's Rockefeller University as a technical assistant in 1918 because "it was the only place that answered my job letters," and continued to work there until last November...
When Rebecca Craighill Lancefield was a child around the turn of the century, scarlet fever seemed a dangerous disease that was easy enough to diagnose but difficult to treat. The victim got a raging sore throat, a high fever, and a rash that spread over most of his body and gave the illness its name. But physicians and bacteriologists found that though they could suppress the rash, they could do little else for their patients. Researchers also found that patients who had one bout of scarlet fever might never have another, but if they got the same kind of sore...
During World War I, tens of thousands of American soldiers became ill with scarlet fever or related strep infections. Mrs. Lancefield, who got her master's at the time and began working for her doctorate in microbiology at Columbia University, had no trouble finding a problem on which to concentrate. Encouraged by her husband, Geneticist Donald E. Lancefield, she became one of the first bacteriologists to recognize that the streptococci are an appallingly complex group of microbes. She spent a decade in the laboratory, painstakingly classifying different strains of streptococci according to the poisons they produce...
While Dr. Lancefield has worked at the Rockefeller Institute refining her findings, other researchers have learned to describe strep germs by their "Lancefield classification." That name, though unknown to the general public, has become a byword among bacteriologists and medical researchers who have applied the Lancefield findings to the control of rheumatic fever-and, consequently, to the prevention of countless cases of mitral-valve damage. Dr. Lancefield's latest work has been devoted to pinning down the kinds of strep, and the nature of their poisons involved in glomerulonephritis-one of the commonest, deadliest and most baffling of kidney...
Last week the American Heart Association, meeting in Atlantic City, gave Dr. Rebecca Craighill Lancefield, 69, some belated public recognition: its 1964 Research Achievement Award...