Biographical Memoirs Volume 85 (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Lewis Thomas
Lewis Thomas
Pages 314-335
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From page 315... ...
Witty, urbane, and skeptical, he may have been the only member of the National Academy of Sciences to win both a National Book Award and an Albert Lasker Award. He is certainly the only medical school dean whose name survives on professorships at Harvard and Cornell, a prize at Rockefeller University, a laboratory at Princeton, and on a book (The Lives of a Cell)
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From page 316... ...
Paterson he contributed to our understanding of acute allergic encephalomyelitis, and he teamed up with H Sherwood Lawrence and John David to define soluble mediators of delayed hypersensitivity: the first inklings of what we now call "cytokines." A prescient suggestion, published only in conference proceedings years before the HIV pandemic, was that our immune system constantly surveys our body to find and destroy aberrant cancer-prone cells; we now attribute Kaposi's sarcoma and other AIDS-related tumors to defects in Thomas's "immune surveillance." Those discoveries resulted from a very intense period of bench research (1946-1964)
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From page 317... ...
By reason of youth and family standing, he ranked low in the eating club hierarchy of prewar Princeton and was grateful to find safe haven at Key and Seal, a club that was literally the furthest out on Prospect Avenue. But high spirits and natural wit brought him to the offices of the Princeton Tiger, where Thomas soon published satires, poems, and parodies under the nom de plume of ELTIE.
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From page 318... ...
What I remember now, from this distance, is the influence of my classmates." Nevertheless, some on that roster made a lasting impression. Hans Zinsser in bacteriology showed that it was possible to function both as a laboratory scientist and a respected writer; Walter B
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From page 319... ...
They had been provoked in rabbits by two appropriately spaced intravenous injections of endotoxin: It was called the generalized Shwartzman phenomenon, and he would tussle with it for the rest of scientific career. Thomas graduated cum laude from the Harvard Medical School in 1937 and began an internship at the Harvard Medical Service of the Boston City Hospital.
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From page 320... ...
and research fellow at P&S from 1939 to 1941, with time out to marry Beryl at Grace Church in New York in January 1941. Robert Loeb abruptly moved to the chairmanship of medicine, but Thomas found that there was a fellowship with John Dingle awaiting him back at the Thorndike and jumped at the chance.
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From page 321... ...
He first put it all together in 1955 on the fifth floor of the Medical Science Building of New York University. As NYU's new professor of pathology, Lewis Thomas (age 42)
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From page 322... ...
But papain had no effect on the cells themselves and there was no evidence of cellular infiltration. Thomas correctly deduced that the dramatic ear droop was a direct attack by papain on cartilage matrix, "the chondroitin sulfate or component to which it is bound." On the morning after the rabbits had received papain, most of the matrix had been leached out.
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From page 323... ...
Thomas immediately understood the implications of this finding. Perhaps, he reasoned, tissue injury in general was due to the uncontrolled release of the body's own papainlike proteases, whether released from cells of the tissue itself or from white cells escaping from the circulation.
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From page 324... ...
The prepared skin had an excess of lactic acid, and they reasoned that lactic acid might activate tissue proteases, the cathepsins. But they were neither able to measure cathepsin activity nor obtain purified cathepsins,
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From page 325... ...
He was diverted for a while by studies of humoral antibodies in allergic encephalomyelitis but returned to rheumatic fever when he was appointed as American Legion Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at the University of Minnesota in 1951. In quick time he put together a team of young investigators, most of whom were soon at work on the Shwartzman phenomenon and the streptococcus: Robert Good, Floyd Denny, Lewis Wannamaker, Richard Smith, and Joel Brunson.
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From page 326... ...
Thomas's international colleagues were frequent visitors: Sir Macfarlane Burnett, Dame Honor Fell, Philip Gell, James Gowans, Sir Peter Medawar, Thomas Sterzl, and Guy Voisin. Early on in his NYU days Thomas hit a rough patch.
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From page 327... ...
If an exogenous protease caused connective tissue damage, where might endogenous proteases reside? Thomas spent a summer with Dame Honor Fell, director of the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge.
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From page 328... ...
But these experiments, the last in which Thomas played a handson role, pointed the way for Thomas's students and their students to elucidate the roles of anaphylatoxins in neutrophil activation, of oxygen-derived free radicals in tissue injury, of lymphokines (now cytokines) such as MIF and IL-1 in cartilage catabolism, of glucocorticoid action in inflammation via NFkB, and, as a follow-up of the cortisone/lysosome experiments, the description and clinical development of liposomes.
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From page 329... ...
His last accolade, before a stoic death of macroglobulinemia, was the first Lewis Thomas Prize from Rockefeller University, "honoring the scientist as poet." LEWIS THOMAS THE WRITER Thomas was for several decades the most widely read interlocutor between the older literary culture and the new world of medical science, preceded in this role by such other American physician-writers as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Walter B Cannon, and Hans Zinsser.
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From page 330... ...
He would point out that the Oxford English Dictionary defines grammar as a body of statements of fact, a science if you will. But a larger portion of grammar spells out the rules of practice
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From page 331... ...
His sense of trial and error at the bench and in the clinic, of how cells divide, microbes hurt, and creatures die gave an edge to his writing. When injected into the bloodstream, endotoxin conveys propaganda, announcing that typhoid bacilli (or other related bacteria)
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From page 332... ...
S Lawrence, Beryl Thomas, and material generously forwarded by Baruj Benacerraf, P
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From page 333... ...
Smithwick. Acute disseminated encephalo myelitis following immunization with homologous brain extracts.
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From page 334... ...
I The effects of endotoxin, endotoxin tolerance and cortisone on release of acid hydrolases from a granular fraction of rabbit liver.
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From page 335... ...
New York: Viking Press. 1990 Etcetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word Watcher.
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