The Influence of a Great Pathologist: A Tribute to Ernest Goodpasture

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume 16 · Number 3 · Spring 1973 THE INFLUENCE OF A GREAT PATHOLOGIST: A TRIBUTE TO ERNEST GOODPASTURE* SIR MACFARLANE BURNETI I was greatly honoured to give the Abraham Flexner Lectures here some 11 years ago, and I believe what I said in those lectures has made its own little impact on the history of immunology. We both enjoyed greatly our 1958 stay in Nashville with our host, the late Dr. Sam Clark, your then professor of anatomy. It gave us a unique opportunity to feel the quality both of Dr. Sam himself and of the South that he loved and made alive for us. At that same time, Dr. Goodpasture, full of years and honours, had after a distinguished retirement career at Washington returned to Nashville and Vanderbilt for a few years of Indian summer in his old laboratory. I met him briefly 6 years before on an earlier visit to the United States in 1952. Those two occasions gave me a fleeting opportunity to savour the personality of the man I want to honour in this lecture. The last writing I read of Goodpasture's was his tribute at the funeral of his old friend Sam Clark, with the note on the reprint that Dr. Goodpasture had himself died a few weeks later. They were two very notable men of differing but wholly compatible personalities. Both were ardent lovers of Vanderbilt and the South, and, if in my mind I tend to fuse the memories I have of the two of them, I think both would have forgiven me. It was a great privilege in 1958 also to know the third of the great figures who had built the Vanderbilt medical school, Dr. Morgan, then just retiring from the chair of medicine. * Editor's Note—This manuscript was prepared to be the first Goodpasture Lecture at Vanderbilt University in 1969. Sir Macfarlane Burnet was not able to deliver the paper .-D.J.I. t School of Microbiology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 1973 | 333 Things were changing at Vanderbilt then—even an outsider from the other side of the earth could sense that. I have no doubt that in almost every aspect this university and medical school have gone on changing like the rest of America, like the rest of the world. I am going to talk about change, but at the level of medical science only —I shall say nothing about campus politics or national attitudes on social and racial affairs. For the time being I am interested only in changes in the approach to the biological sciences on which modern medicine has been founded. I want to discuss it primarily by taking some of Goodpasture's contributions—those seminal contributions which opened up at least four major fields of research—and following very briefly and rather superficially how they have been developed since. One of my own main fields of study, the growth of viruses in the chick embryo, stems directly from Goodpasture's work, and I shall probably give this topic pride of place. I shall end by speaking a little sadly about how medical research has changed since the twenties and thirties, when Goodpasture did his most important work, or the thirties and forties, which was my scientific generation. I have for many years been vividly conscious of the debt my own work owes to two great Americans, Theobald Smith and Ernest Goodpasture. I never met Theobald Smith, and his ideas had filtered through the writings of others long before I read his famous exposition of the ecological approach in medicine. I think you will find that almost everything I have written about the biology of disease has been influenced by Theobald Smith's approach. Goodpasture's influence was more direct and specifically influenced two areas of my own experimental work. I have already mentioned the chick embryo for virus cultivation; the second was the pathogenesis of infection by herpes simplex virus. The Seminal Contributions The first paper I shall mention was an investigation of the bacteriology of pandemic influenza carried out at the Chelsea Naval Hospital in Massachusetts in 1918-1919...