Microbiology and Immunology

Goodpasture, Ernest William WORLD OF MICROBIOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY

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GOODPASTURE, ERNESTWILLIAM

(1886-1960)Goodpasture, Ernest William

American pathologist

Ernest William Goodpasture created a means of culturing

virusesin the laboratory without contaminationfrom foreign

bacteria. This research was instrumental in the development of

most of the vaccines and inoculations used in medicine today.

Additionally, Goodpasture developed an alternate way of

staining specimens for examination under the microscope. He

also pursued research interests in varying other fields of med-

icine, and identified a progressive and rare immune systemill-

ness that became known as Goodpasture’s Syndrome.

Goodpasture was born in Montgomery County,

Tennessee. He left home to study medicine in 1909, and

received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. He

then served as the Rockefeller Fellow in Pathology until 1914.

Goodpasture returned to practicing medicine and served his

residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston from

1915 to 1917. In 1917, he was offered a professorship at

Harvard University, but only remained there for three years.

Shortly thereafter, Goodpasture was appointed chair of pathol-

ogy at Vanderbilt University. The position at Vanderbilt

afforded Goodpasture the opportunity to return home, he

accepted and remained with the university for the entirety of

his career.

In 1931, Goodpasture, working with Alice Woodruff,

devised a method for cultivating viruses that revolutionized

virology. Because rickettsiae and other viruses will only grow

on living tissue, scientists had to study viruses on living hosts

or on tissue cells cultures in the lab. Before the advent of

antibiotics, lab cultures were often tainted by bacteria. Thus,

viruses remained illusive to scientific study. Little was known

about their structure and behavior. Goodpasture used fertilized

chicken eggs to culturehis viruses, a method that proved not

only successful, but also cost effective. The team first suc-

cessfully cultured fowl pox virus, but quickly proved that a

multitude of viruses could be studied using the technique.

Within a span of a few years, other scientists used

Goodpasture’s technique to create vaccines for yellow fever,

smallpox, and influenza.

Goodpasture himself worked to create a vaccination

against the mumps. In 1934, Goodpasture and his colleague,

C.D. Johnsen, proved that the mumps virus vas filterable. This

prompted to team to devise a method by which the virus could

be manipulated to produce a vaccine.

Throughout the course of his career, Goodpasture was

chiefly concerned with infectious diseases, but he also con-

ducted research in the formation of various types of cancers

and genetic diseases. His name was given to a condition that

he discovered working in tandem with doctors at Vanderbilt

University Hospital. Goodpasture’s Syndrome is a rare and

often fatal autoimmune disorder that affects the kidneys.

See alsoLaboratory techniques in immunology; Laboratory

techniques in microbiology

GGotschlich, Emil ClausOTSCHLICH, EMILCLAUS(1935- )

German-American physician and bacteriologist

Emil Gotschlich’s basic research on Meningococcus,

Gonococcus, Streptococcus, Haemophilus, Escherichia coli,

protein antigens, and polysaccharides has contributed much to

the knowledge of immunology, vaccines, and the bacterial

pathogenesis of meningitis, gonorrhea, and other diseases.

Gotschlich was born on January 17, 1935, in Bangkok,

Thailand, to Emil Clemens Gotschlich, and his wife Magdalene,

née Holst, both expatriate Germans. He immigrated to the

United States in 1950 and became a naturalized American citi-

zen in 1955, the same year that he received his A.B. from the

New York University College of Arts and Sciences. After

receiving his M.D. from the New York University School of

Medicine in 1959, he interned at Bellevue Hospital in New York

City until 1960, then joined the staff of Rockefeller University,

where he built the rest of his career, except for serving as a cap-

tain in the Department of Bacteriology of the U.S. Army

Medical Corps at the Walter Reed Institute for Research in

Washington, D.C., from 1966 to 1968. At Rockefeller in 2002,

he is simultaneously professor of bacteriology, head of the

Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology Laboratory, vice pres-

ident for medical sciences, and principal investigator of the

General Clinical Research Center.

Gotschlich’s team at Rockefeller continues to achieve

important results in bacteriology and immunology and has pub-

lished hundreds of scientific papers. As of 2000, Gotschlich

was the author, lead author, or co-author of 135 of these papers.

The main focus of his research is the Neisseriagenus of bacte-

ria, especially two pathogenic varieties: the meningococcus

Neisseria meningitidisand the gonococci Neisseria gonor-

rhoeae.In the 1970s, he engaged in a fruitful scientific corre-

spondence with Harry A. Feldman (1914–1985) about

meningococcal diseases and won the 1978 Albert Lasker

Award for his part in developing a polysaccharide vaccine

against these diseases. In 1984, he outlined protocols for the

development of a gonorrhea vaccine. In 2001, the United States

Centers for Disease Controlappointed him to its national

review committee on anthraxvaccine safety and efficacy.

Medicine and medical research are a tradition in

Gotschlich’s family. His grandfather, Emil Carl Anton

Constantin Gotschlich, a student of Carl Flügge and a col-

league of Max Josef von Pettenkoffer (1818–1901) and

Robert Koch(1843–1910), was a prominent German aca-

demic physician, hygienist, and epidemiologist who special-

ized in cholera and tropical diseases. His great uncle, Felix

Gotschlich (b. 1874), also studied cholera and in 1906 iso-

lated El Tor vibrio cholerae,an epidemic strain of the cholera

bacillus. His father was a physician in private practice in

Thailand. His second wife, Kathleen Ann Haines (b. 1949), a

pediatric allergist and immunologist in New York City; his

son, Emil Christopher Gotschlich (b. 1961), an obstetri-

cian/gynecologist in Portland, Maine; and his daughter, Hilda

Christina Gartley (b. 1965), a pediatrician in Boston,

Massachusetts, all continue this tradition.

See alsoAntibiotics; Antibody and antigen; Bacteria and

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