Word: virologist
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Still, researchers now had enough interferon to move studies out of the laboratory and into the clinic. In 1972 Virologist Thomas Merigan, of Stanford University, and a group of British researchers began studying IF's effect on the common cold. Soviet doctors were claiming success in warding off respiratory infections with weak sprays of IF made in a Moscow laboratory. Merigan and his colleagues gave 16 volunteers a nasal spray of interferon one day before and three days after they were exposed to common cold viruses. Another 16 volunteers were subjected to the same viruses without any protection. The results...
...continued working with IF for about three years, but then left it, believing its puzzles could best be worked out by biochemists. "I spared myself years of frustration," he says. Most of his colleagues, aware of the difficulties of interferon studies, considered his decision totally rational. Said one distinguished virologist at the time: "Anybody who abandons interferon research cannot be entirely stupid...
...small band of interferon researchers were able to produce or get their hands on enough interferon to analyze its nature, but the stuff was far too scarce or any significant tests on humans. Most of the credit for relieving that acute shortage goes to a stubborn Finnish virologist, Kari Cantell, who proudly admits that "interferon has been my hobby and main scientific interest for over 20 years." Cantell began his career by studying the role of leukocytes, or white blood cells, in fighting infection. He became intrigued when he learned from other researchers in 1961 that these cells could produce...
...application to the A.C.S. reached the desk of Frank Rauscher, who before becoming the society's research chief in 1976 had been director of the National Cancer Institute for five years. At the institute he had been urged repeatedly to "do something about interferon." But Rauscher, himself a virologist, had moved cautiously. He did send an NCI team to Sweden to look at Strander's IF tests with bone cancer, and the institute co-sponsored a 1975 interferon conference in Manhattan. But during his tenure, Rauscher increased the NCI commitment to interferon by a scant $1 million yearly. Says...
Time and again the World Health Organization has declared smallpox extinct, only to have the ancient scourge reappear like a genie from a virologist's flask. Although the last known case of smallpox occurred in Somalia last October, the disease has not died out. An Englishwoman working at the University of Birmingham Medical School contracted it, presumably from virus escaping from a lab on a floor below. Before the case was diagnosed, a co-worker flew off to North Dakota on a holiday, thereby extending the smallpox alert...