Edwin J. Cohn and the Development of Protein Chemistry: With a Detailed Account of His Work on the Fractionation of Blood during and after World War II - Hardcover

Surgenor, Douglas M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674009622 ISBN 13: 9780674009622

Publisher: Center for Blood Research, 2002

Synopsis

“Blood,” Goethe observed in Faust, “is a very special juice.” How special it is and how complex as well is revealed in Douglas Surgenor’s Edwin J. Cohn and the Development of Protein Chemistry.

As Surgenor aptly shows, what began as a modest program in basic research at the Harvard Medical School in 1920 with the establishment of a small laboratory for the study of the physical chemistry of proteins, suddenly and quite unexpectedly took on immensely practical proportions twenty years later when the onset of World War II made requisite new sophisticated blood techniques and blood substitutes for the treatment of military casualties.

The knowledge and expertise gained by Edwin Cohn and his laboratory associates in the study of proteins, amino acids, and peptides in blood after 1920 put them in a unique position to carry out the search for new blood products. Edwin J. Cohn and the Development of Protein Chemistry discloses how the wartime emergency called into play Cohn’s talents as a leader who drew together chemists, clinicians, pathologists, immunologists, and others in the attainment of a complex goal. The revolution Cohn started has still not run its course.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas M. Surgenor is Senior Investigator, Emeritus, at the Center for Blood Research.

Reviews

The opening sequences of the movie Saving Private Ryan reproduced the landing of the U.S. armed forces at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. An attentive observer would have noticed U.S. Navy corpsmen scurrying around the beachhead, infusing albumin intravenously into wounded soldiers. By the summer of 1941, pure human albumin had been prepared in the laboratory of Edwin J. Cohn (Figure) at Harvard Medical School. On December 8, 1941, the entire stockpile of human albumin at Harvard was seized by the government and flown to Honolulu, where it was infused into naval personnel who had been severely burned during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The albumin proved to be lifesaving in countless cases. Cohn established the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in September 1920. He gathered about him a distinguished group of chemists who were interested in defining the characteristics of proteins and peptides -- and they succeeded brilliantly. Nonetheless, eyebrows were raised among members of the medical school faculty over the presence of this sizable contingent of scientists engaged in what appeared to be the most esoteric sort of basic science. The endeavor was primarily supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose trustees were informed by the foundation's George W. Gray in 1944 that "to create such a department in a medical school was a somewhat unusual and imaginative thing to do. . . . It was quite clear that these researchers would not be, at the moment nor for some long time to come, very closely related to the practical problems of sickness and health. But the Harvard authorities had the courage and the wisdom to back a patient, basic, long-range enterprise." It is difficult now to imagine how this endeavor flourished with a grant of only $15,000 a year from the Rockefeller Foundation and some funds from the university. Fifteen scientists were employed in the laboratory. In 1940, the National Research Council, perceiving a "terrorist threat" from Nazi Germany, contributed $1,500 more to the plasma-fractionation effort. Cohn appeared daily in the oak-paneled laboratory, clad in his three-piece Savile Row suits. Given the attire of Harvard professors these days, one realizes how much the world has changed in the past 60 years. One remnant remains. I still have Cohn's office blackboard, on the frame of which is inscribed the words of Goethe's Faust: "Das Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft" ("Blood is a quite extraordinary draught"). Edwin J. Cohn and the Development of Protein Chemisty describes at length and in detail Cohn's transformation from a laboratory chemist to the manager of a vast wartime effort that became a mini-Manhattan Project. Massive numbers of blood donations were required for the plasma-fractionation program, and this effort was skillfully coordinated with the Red Cross. Collaborations with clinicians were set up to test various plasma fractions. Two prisoners at the Norfolk County jail died of serum sickness induced by infusions of crystalline bovine albumin. Harvard medical students were admitted to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and bled until they went into shock; they were successfully rescued with human serum albumin. At the height of the war, fractions containing gamma globulin were shown to attenuate or prevent measles and, subsequently, poliomyelitis. A blood-cell separator was invented. The accomplishments were numerous, and the prizes and honors followed in abundance at the end of the war. Edwin J. Cohn was an extraordinary and complex person. He aroused fear, loathing, and admiration in the people around him. He was at once cruel and compassionate, brilliant and obtuse. Fifty years after his death, people still spoke of him in hushed tones. He was a workaholic before the term was invented. Dead at 60 years of age from the hypertensive consequences of an undiagnosed pheochromocytoma, he left a scientific legacy that lives on long after him. Fred S. Rosen, M.D.
Copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Edition details

• Publisher: Center for Blood Research
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674009622
• ISBN 13: 9780674009622
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464