Max Theiler
| Max Theiler | |
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| Born | 30 January 1899 Pretoria, South African Republic (present-day South Africa) |
| Died | 11 August 1972 (aged 73) New Haven, Connecticut, USA |
| Residence | USA |
| Nationality | South African, American |
| Fields | Virology |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1951) |
Max Theiler (30 January 1899 – 11 August 1972) was a South African American virologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951 for developing a vaccine against yellow fever.
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Career development [edit]
Theiler was born in Pretoria, then the capital of the South African Republic (now South Africa); his father Arnold Theiler was a veterinary bacteriologist from Switzerland. He attended Pretoria Boys High School, Rhodes University College, and then University of Cape Town Medical School, graduating in 1918. He left South Africa to study at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, King's College London, and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1922 he was awarded a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene and became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of London and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Theiler wanted to pursue a career in research, so in 1922 he took a position at the Harvard University School of Tropical Medicine. He spent several years investigating amoebic dysentery and trying to develop a vaccine from rat-bite fever. He became assistant to Andrew Sellards and started working on yellow fever. In 1926 they disproved Hideyo Noguchi's hypothesis that yellow fever was caused by the bacterium Leptospira icteroides, and in 1928 (the year after the disease was identified conclusively as a virus), they showed that the African and South American viruses are immunologically identical (after Adrian Stokes induced yellow fever in Rhesus monkeys from India). In the course of this research Theiler himself contracted yellow fever but survived and developed immunity.
In 1930 Theiler moved to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, where he later became director of the Virus Laboratory. He was professor of epidemiology and public health at Yale University from 1964 to 1967.
Work on yellow fever [edit]
After passing the yellow fever virus through laboratory mice, Theiler found that the weakened virus conferred immunity on Rhesus monkeys. The stage was thus set for Theiler to develop a vaccine against the disease. However, it was only in 1937, after the particularly virulent Asibi strain from West Africa had gone through more than a hundred subcultures, that Theiler and his colleague Hugh Smith announced the development of the 17-D vaccine. Between 1940 and 1947 the Rockefeller Foundation produced more than 28 million doses of the vaccine and finally ended yellow fever as a major disease. For this work Theiler received the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Theiler was awarded the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene's Chalmers Medal in 1939, Harvard University's Flattery Medal in 1945, and the American Public Health Association's Lasker Award in 1949.
Theiler's Murine Encephalomyelitis Virus (TMEV) [edit]
In 1937, Max Theiler discovered a filterable agent that was a known cause for paralysis in mice. He found the virus was not transmittable to Rhesus monkeys, and that only some mice developed symptoms.[1] The virus is now referred to as Theiler's murine encephalomyelitis virus. The virus has been well characterized, and now serves as a standard model for studying multiple sclerosis.
Private life [edit]
He married Lillian Graham in 1928 and they had one daughter. He died in New Haven, Connecticut.
Publications [edit]
Max Theiler was a contributor to three books, Viral and Rickettsial Infections of Man (1948), Yellow Fever (1951), and The Arthropod-Borne Viruses of Vertebrates: An Account of The Rockefeller Foundation Virus Program, 1951–1970, Max Theiler and W. G. Downs. (1973) Yale University Press. New Haven and London. ISBN 0-300-01508-9. He wrote numerous papers in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology.
References [edit]
- ^ Theiler, M. (1937). "Spontaneous Encephalomyelitis of Mice, A New Virus Disease". Journal of Experimental Medicine 65 (5): 705–19. doi:10.1084/jem.65.5.705. PMC 2133518. PMID 19870629.
- Charles, C.W., Jr. Theiler, Max. American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
- Theiler, Max: A Dictionary of Scientists. Oxford University Press, 1999.
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- 1899 births
- 1972 deaths
- Alumni of King's College London
- American Nobel laureates
- American virologists
- Harvard University faculty
- Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine
- Rhodes University alumni
- Rhodes University academics
- South African emigrants to the United States
- South African Nobel laureates
- South African scientists
- White South African people
- University of Cape Town alumni
- Alumni of St Thomas's Hospital Medical School
