麻豆视频

.

鈥淎ny investigator is indeed fortunate who can contribute a tiny stone to the great edifice which we call scientific truth."

Those are the words of George H. Whipple as he accepted the 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine during a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden. 听His award-winning research had started many years earlier at the University of California's . 听It continued in Rochester, after he became the founding dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1921.

Using dogs, Whipple studied the effects of different foods on anemia caused by significant blood loss. 听His meticulous records were noted by Professor I. Holmgren, a member of the Nobel Prize committee. "Whipple's experiments were planned exceedingly well and carried out very accurately," Holmgren said during the presentation ceremony.

While conducting his research, Whipple discovered liver seemed to be the best food to repair anemia in his dogs. This finding caught the attention of two Harvard University scientists, George Minot and William P. Murphy,who were studying a different type of anemia called pernicious anemia.

"In the early 20th century, was a huge medical problem, and almost universally fatal," Marshall A. Lichtman, M.D., says. Lichtman, professor Medicine and Hematology/Oncology at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, says patients suffering from pernicious anemia faced severe physical and neurological impairment before they died. "No one really had a clue about what caused this disease or how it could be treated."

Influenced by Whipple's work, Minot and Murphy set up their own study in hopes of finding a cure.

"It was one of the largest studies at the time, with some 45 patients with pernicious anemia," Lichtman says. 听"They began feeding them a very elaborate diet, containing a lot of things besides liver. 听But through a series of trial and error, they began to sense that liver was the main beneficial effect."

This finding resulted in a treatment that required consumption of massive amounts of liver. 听Not pleasant, but life saving. 听And worthy of a Noble Prize. 听(Eventually, scientists would isolate the key ingredient in liver -- Vitamin B12 -- so patients today need only to have monthly injections.)

Several decades after winning the Nobel Prize, Whipple retired from the University of Rochester. 听His office was turned into a museum, everything left just the way it was when he closed the door. 听The pages and pages of handwritten notes recording his Nobel Prize-winning research, however, were not there. 听After Whipple died in 1976, his children gave his medal to the University. 听They did not, however, have his painstaking research. No one knew where it was.

More than a decade later, Librarian Christopher Hoolihan, M.L.S., received an unexpected visit.

鈥淎 maintenance man came to me and he said, 'For years I鈥檝e been using a closet and I store my mop in there and my bucket听 and my brooms and all my cleaning supplies and my coffee pot and my chair where I take a break,'鈥� Hoolihan recalls. "And, he said there were a lot of filing cabinets in there."

The closet was adjacent to Whipple's old office, but an old door connecting the two had been sealed over. Hoolihan was amazed by what he found in the cabinets.

"It was all Whipple's research that he had done on dogs, both at the Hooper Institute in San Francisco and here in Rochester, by which he earned the Nobel Prize.听 It was all his original research, sitting in these filing cabinets for decades!"

Hoolihan, needless to say, carefully catalogued , which now are safely stored in the Miner Library archives.

听

For another perspective on the Whipple's career, listen to this of the late Leon L. Miller, M.D., Ph.D., a longtime 麻豆视频scientist and physician.

听

听

听

听